Eli5 In the days of dial up internet how would large organisations (or even homes with more than 1 computer) enable multiple computers to use the internet at once
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Something to understand is that there is the internet “backbone” and then there’s the “last mile”. There’s a bunch of things in between the backbone and the last mile, but let’s focus on the 2 ends of it.
The internet backbone is what connects the internet together. From your city to the next city over. From one country to the next. The undersea fiber networks are a part of this. Then there’s the last mile. This is what you interact with. Your home or office to your ISP. That’s what dial up was back then. And it quickly evolved to DSL, cable internet, and now direct fiber.
Your ISP is one of the layers in the middle. Your ISP might buy access to the internet backbone through an ISP for ISPs, or they may actually own a part of the backbone. There are a lot of ways this can work out, it’s kind of like the cell phone industry where you got the tower owners (AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile) and the resellers like Tracfone or Google Fi.
Generally speaking, a company with something like their own servers or a giant office building can buy a connection from someone that owns a part of the internet backbone. They would physically lay a copper or fiber line and would have access to substantially faster internet than last mile consumers. But it’s obviously expensive. Fiber tech has been commercially available since the 80’s, but has dropped substantially in price since then. As prices dropped, they became the preferred choice. Up through maybe the mid-00’s copper like T1 connections were common for this use but they’re laughably slow compared to modern connections (<10mbit symmetrical up/down).
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