United States

About connectivity in United States

The United States uses 120V/60Hz with Type A and Type B outlets — the North American standard codified by NEMA. The phone jack is RJ-11, the global default for analogue lines (originated under FCC Part 68 after the 1976 Carterfone-era regulations). The 1984 AT&T breakup created the regional Bell operating companies; subsequent consolidation led to the current Big Three of AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA, with cable competitors Comcast and Spectrum dominating fixed broadband.

The US dial-up ISP era unfolded in two distinct waves. The first wave was closed online services: CompuServe (commercial from 1979), The Source (1979-1989), GEnie (GE Information Services, 1985), Prodigy (1990, an IBM/Sears joint venture), and Quantum Link / AOL (founded 1985, rebranded AOL 1989). The second wave began when the US Internet was opened to commercial traffic in 1991 and the World Wide Web reached consumers in 1993-1994 — UUNET (backbone), Netcom, PSINet, Mindspring, EarthLink, and a long tail of regional ISPs competed for dial-up subscribers. AOL switched from hourly billing to a $19.95 flat-rate in 1996 and grew to over 30 million subscribers at peak. The late 1990s introduced ad-supported free dial-up (NetZero, Juno, BlueLight.com). Broadband displaced dial-up steadily from 1998 onward as cable (@Home, RoadRunner) and DSL services rolled out; the US dial-up subscriber base peaked at roughly 35 million households around 2000 and declined steadily through the 2010s.

AT&T introduced its Long Distance Calling Card in 1969 as a corporate billing instrument, predating the consumer prepaid era by two decades. Sprint launched its FONCARD in 1986, MCI followed, and the 1984 AT&T breakup combined with the 1996 Telecommunications Act unleashed a wave of competing long-distance carriers and prepaid card resellers. Through the 1990s and 2000s prepaid international calling cards became a mass-market category — thousands of branded cards (IDT, Sprint, AT&T, MCI, plus hundreds of regional issuers) competed at per-minute rates to specific country destinations, sold through gas stations, convenience stores, ethnic groceries, and check-cashing locations targeting the Caribbean, Mexico, Philippines, India, China, Russia, Nigeria, Ghana, and Eastern European diaspora markets. The US public payphone fleet peaked at approximately 2.6 million units in 1995, fell below 500,000 by 2007, and dropped below 100,000 by 2018; New York City removed its last public payphone from a Midtown sidewalk in May 2022.

Tempest Telecom served US customers as a base market — RADIUS-authenticated dial-up roaming for Americans traveling abroad, plus inbound roaming services for international travelers visiting the US. Tempest's customers used prepaid calling cards heavily for both diaspora-call needs and for road-warrior business travelers who preferred metered cards to per-minute carrier rates, with voice and data minutes drawing from the same unified balance. Iridium satphones served outdoor industries (Alaska oil-and-gas, Gulf of Mexico shipping, remote-area NGOs, and expedition crews); BGAN terminals served broadcast news, defense contractors, and Arctic/Antarctic research operations. Tempest's named institutional customers included USAID, NATO's Supreme Allied Command Europe, and the US State Department.

Modern US fixed broadband is dominated by cable (DOCSIS 3.1 / 4.0) and increasingly FTTH from Verizon Fios, AT&T Fiber, Frontier, and a growing set of altnet operators. Mobile 5G coverage is universal from the Big Three.

Tempest's services across United States, 1997–2012

Tempest Telecommunications operated international connectivity services in United States between 1997 and 2012 under a unified prepaid account that absorbed multiple service types onto a single customer credential. Customers in United States drew from the same balance for pre-paid international voice calling, RADIUS-authenticated dial-up Internet roaming, metered Wi-Fi hotspot access, Iridium satellite voice, and Inmarsat BGAN data terminals. The PATN kiosk-card clearinghouse (Tempest's TITAN kiOSK, incorporated 2000) extended the same card-and-PIN model to public Internet terminals but did not reach scale.

Iridium satellite voice was available in United States from approximately 2001 (post-bankruptcy relaunch). Thuraya coverage did not extend to United States; Inmarsat BGAN data terminals filled the broadband gap from late 2005.

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