The price wasn’t too bad for me. I didn’t have a very high income, but I paid for my ISDN myself.
But I do remember the improvement after switching to DSL, even if this was the early days of DSL that didn’t work thaaat great, it was still way better than analog modem or ISDN.
Oooh yeah, ISDN. My cable solution that I got in year 2000 (to answer OP’s question) didn’t work very well, and DSL wasn’t an option yet I think.
For those ready to listen to my nostalgia:
ISDN was awesome because even the smallest solution had two channels. So two phonecalls on one line. Great for businesses. Also, a channel had 64 kbit, slightly faster than the analog modems which I think maxed out at 54 kbit, which was often unlikely to be reached.
But the trick is, the two channels could be combined to 128 kbit. An incoming or outgoing phonecall would simply reduce the speed back to 64, instead of interrupting the connection.
Although I paid by the minute, and using two channels doubled the cost, so I usually only used it when I was literally waiting for a data transfer and would be paying the same price anyway.
Actually, I think my ISDN would count as dial-up, as I paid by the minute.
Here in Denmark it’s normal to pay 6 months rent before getting the key. (3 months rent plus deposit equivalent to another 3 months.)
However, the market here is very different.
1: I believe it’s very easy to get a bank loan for this. If they say no, it’s because you can’t afford the rent. (I could be wrong here.)
2: The contract isn’t locked for 12 months or so at a time. You can cancel the contract at any time, effective from the last day of next month. Also the contract doesn’t expire after 12 months, generally you live there as long as you pay for it.
3: Many other details that means that landlords aren’t the enemy, they provide a service for people who can’t or doesn’t want to own and maintain their own property.
I don’t know if this is exact enough, but I use IKEA switches and IKEA or other ZigBee bulbs.
The switches looks like a different brand of paddle switches. They work like “dumb” paddle switches as a starting point, and then you build smartness on top of that.
If you do it right, they also work when internet is down and your server is crashed. Actually this is how they work out of the box. (I think the bridge must be powered on, but if you don’t have power…)