[bwann]

As an small ISP owner in the 90s, there was no way to win. Incoming phone lines were a considerable hunk of your expenses so you wanted to have enough available at peak time in the evenings to not have busy signals. Smaller POPs may have only had a couple dozen phone lines. For the very vast majority of subscriber, they'd dial up for 2-6 hours, browse the web and whatnot, and disconnect. I hated the "unlimited" thing at the time because it was so shady for reasons like this. But, if you tried to sell "X hours per month" people really didn't like knowing they were on the clock, and if you tried to market it as "unmetered" then you got nailed by people saying "well what's the difference between unmetered and unlimited??" (I tried both). In retrospect I probably should've just played along with "unlimited" and fired/ran off my customers who kept connections nailed up for 20 hours a day.

[Eisenstein]

Wouldn't another solution to have been to appeal to the courts or the legislature to sanction competitors who used unfair and misleading wording in their plan terms?

[pixl97]

Courts typically take years to process cases like this. By the time dialup peaked there were cases about this, but the eventual solution was the market moving to high speed internet.