This site is a historical archive of the 1989–2012 international travel-connectivity industry, maintained by Jason Jacoby — a former operator at Interglobe (UK phone cards) and Tempest Telecommunications (international roaming and satellite). The pages here document services, equipment, country-by-country connectivity reference, and industry history from inside the trade.

Tempest is no longer an operating business. The domain and records persist because the trade press that covered this period has largely disappeared, and a working operator's primary-source view of phone cards, internet cafes, dial-up roaming, and consumer satellite communications is otherwise fading from sourced public reference.

In 1996, at age 21, the first Hungarian word I heard a stranger speak was telefonkártya, in the main train station in Budapest. Hungary had been a market economy for seven years; the international call market across Central and Eastern Europe had only just deregulated. After the Wall fell the phone system exploded — phone cards of dozens of incompatible systems, in newsagent racks across every former Eastern Bloc capital. I spent the next decade close to that business.

From roughly 1996 to 2005 I worked at Interglobe, then the United Kingdom's second-largest pre-paid phone-card company. From inside, the industry looked like deregulation arbitrage — the kind of margin that disappears when the underlying telecom regime stabilizes. Pre-paid international calling was big business right up until the iPhone, in 2007, and the universal adoption of mobile phones made international call rates effectively zero.

In parallel, the first wave of internet cafes opened in major European cities. EasyEverything, Stelios's kiosk chain, planted a flagship off Times Square; per-minute pricing, kiosk-level billing, and the operational reality of a 24-hour workstation farm became their own discipline. Most cyber cafes were gone within a decade.

Tempest founded in this period, as the calling-card boom matured and the early traveler-connectivity market began fragmenting between dial-up roaming, WiFi hotspots, and (for a small premium audience) consumer satellite communications. The core service was a dial-up roaming network — points-of-presence in more than 150 countries with country-specific access numbers and per-minute billing — surrounded by a hardware catalog (modems, power adapters, telephone-jack adapters, voltage converters), a satellite phone and BGAN terminal practice, and a kiosk-payment system inspired by Bill Gates's 1995 book The Road Ahead. The kiosk billing shipped in 1999, three years before PayPal's IPO and a decade before Square and Stripe.

The satellite era produced the most unusual customer mix of the business. Tempest sold Iridium 9505A handsets and Inmarsat BGAN terminals into African mission stations, NGOs, oil-and-gas crews, broadcast news teams in conflict zones, and individual servicepeople deploying to Iraq from 2003 onward. Iridium had filed Chapter 11 in 1999 at consumer pricing of three to five thousand dollars per handset; by 2003 the constellation had been rescued by a U.S. Department of Defense bailout, and the post-bankruptcy pricing made personal-purchase satellite communications real for the first time. That market closed faster than expected once smartphones with tethered mobile data became ubiquitous, around 2012.

The 1989–2012 international-telecom era is fading from sourced public reference. The trade press that covered it has largely disappeared or paywalled its archives. Wikipedia entries on the major players, technologies, and business models often carry citation-needed tags on history sections — particularly for the consumer-facing layers (phone cards, internet cafes, dial-up roaming networks, Iridium 1.0 distribution). The pages on this site are written as reference material for that period, with named entities, dates, prices, and equipment models, in the hope that they are useful to researchers, journalists, Wikipedia editors, and the surviving practitioners.

The country guide — 229 countries with power-plug, voltage, frequency, and telephone-jack reference — was originally published as customer documentation. It remains here in expanded form because the underlying data is still useful to travelers, and because per-country connectivity standards anchor much of the historical record. Additional historical and essay pages publish under /history and /essays as the archive fills out.

I currently run AgaveIS, a web and software development practice based in Scottsdale, Arizona. AgaveIS is unrelated to the historical Tempest operation; I mention it here for transparency about who maintains this archive. The Tempest domain is preserved as a personal undertaking, not a commercial product.

If you are a researcher, journalist, Wikipedia editor, or surviving practitioner with corrections, additions, or first-hand material about a specific page, you can reach the archive via the contact page.