Man, that’s slow…

2004Internet was connecting Romanian homes at a maximum speed of 128kbit/second, while most of them were still suffering of the terrible dial-up connections noise, haunting many of us still today. People could not afford the fastest offers, usually reserved to companies. The answer was simple: let’s take one big subscription for the whole bloc and share the costs. Well to be honest, many saw it as an economic opportunity more than a collaborative project between neighbors. After 40 years under the authoritarian regimes of Ceaușescu and his predecessors, who were encouraging spying on your friends to turn them in, Romanians usually don’t trust their neighbors, making collaboration not the most common practice. Which is ironic: they would trust any foreigner way more than the guy next door. Anyway, here the DIY-spirit and the economic motivations became stronger than the culture of distrust.

An infrastructure built by people

And here it all started. Each bloc had its own little entrepreneur. One guy would take the best subscription, install a switch to start distributing the network to other people and finally, go from door to door to find subscribers. For each new subscriber, a UTP-ethernet cable would be plugged from their apartment to the apartment hosting the switch. Most of the time they were using the electric chute of the building to get the cable through, sometimes drill holes, or even use windows in the most sloppy and desperate cases. The subscription owner would have the power over the means of communication: if you didn’t pay, used too much of the bandwidth, or got in a conflict with him, he could unplug your cable anytime.

Tinder before Tinder

People started to connect buildings between them, and even developed a neighborhood intra-net. For some it became a big “LAN-party”, playing multiplayers video-game with inhabitants of the bloc. For others it was a place to chat and meet people from your neighborhood. Friends here told me about their first dates they had with neighbors met on the intra-net’s chat. 10 years ago internet was local, making it a natural Tinder.

Providers can’t fool Romanians

This organic infrastructure providing a way better quality of services than in many european countries back then, providers had to come up with something really good in order to get customers. This is what made Romania’s internet services so competitive in today’s world. As Bernie Sanders’s recent tweet illustrates it perfectly:

A good deal

Big companies decided to get their hands on those neighborhood networks. The providers would go to the one-guy of the bloc to buy his network, using it first hand to acquire their customers. They would later install their own infrastructure. Today quite ironically, precisely while I’m writing this article, my new internet provider is installing a 500mb/s connection in my apartment. The monthly price: $9.5 (39 RON). One of the good reasons for foreign web entrepreneurs to settle their new basecamp here. Oh, and if you’d like to compare your internet connexion to the ones over here, just take the Bernie Sanders Speedtest.

Kids turning into experts

And what about this guy in all that? He was one of the many 16 years old kids building DIY-networking infrastructures in their bloc. They reversed engineered the equipment they were using, to adapt and optimise it to this purpose. They developed a knowledge that they could sell to other blocs looking to optimise their network, or in other words, their business. That is to me one of the most impressive things: while today we can all learn how to do anything over the internet, back then this knowledge was not available. They had to develop it by themselves instead of learning it from others.

This deep knowledge and passion is still with them them 10 years later, and has greatly improved, making them the experts that you can find sitting next to you, like I did that day.