I measured the speed of Britain's internet

01Lived

This was the mid-to-late 1990s, the run-up to the dot-com bust, and everyone was piling onto the internet. Businesses were throwing up websites, households were getting online, and new dial-up providers were launching every month to serve them. Every provider claimed to be the fastest and the most reliable, all of them charged by the minute, and nobody actually knew which was best. That was the gap. My company was Net Basics. I built the system that measured the actual speed of the UK's dial-up ISPs, ranked them, and sold the rankings to the internet magazines. For the magazines it was perfect: independent numbers nobody else had, current, comparable, provider by provider. The listings spread into every UK internet magazine's ISP guide, and then into cover-mounted books: entire two-hundred-page giveaways with 200+ ISPs on test. If you bought an internet magazine in the late ’90s and checked the listings before choosing your provider, you were reading Net Basics. It was a home run.