I worked at a tiny ISP in 2000. We had nationwide (maybe worldwide?) dialups through MegaPoP [1]; they would passthrough auth for user@dgx.net to our radius server, and charge us (IIRC) $5 for each user that successfully authenticated every month. I think we charged $10/month for local dialup only (where they called into our T1 modem bank) and $20/month for nationwide dialup... at least until our modem bank T1 failed and we couldn't get the telco to fix it so we just pushed everyone to the megapop numbers.
[1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.
Neat! I didn't know how that worked. The little ISP I used to do some things for had physical POPs in different cities and AFAIK never went with Megapop or similar. Eventually, their POPs became all-in-one card cage devices that took a combination of PRI and T1 circuits and screwed them together with PPP, which seemed quite highly integrated to me at that time.
It does look like these may be Starnet/Megapop numbers, based on the panix.motd.megapop newsgroup mentioned on Panix's website. I did spend a minute trying to find who (if anyone) is steering the remaining dregs of Megapop, but I didn't make it very far.
I called a couple of them that were nearby and a modem answered.
I'm not interested in dialup data services at all at this point in 2026. I have no remaining means with which to use such a thing. The last cell phone I had that could act like a modem got retired in 2009 and the last time I had a dialtone in my house was 2010.
But if I had to guess, then I'd guess that these time machines are still operational.
I am not a black hat SEO expert by any means, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt. It sounds like you may have been the victim of a negative SEO attack. In short: one of your competitors may have created these millions of spammy links in order to decrease your rankings (and, presumably, raise their own closer to the top). If this is still a site you care about, consider disavowing the spammy links: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
A very solid piece of advice on the disavow links, and very much acted upon a few years ago (of course I still maintain a close watch on links!)
Also, to another reply a bit further down, I actually started fresh with a new domain about 6 months after the initial penalty, and used 301 redirects from the old (penalized) site to the new.
I did this to reduce confusion from my existing users, as their was no reason why they should have to retype or bookmark a new domain name. Sure I was going through a very rough patch, but my users should not have to as well!
I had a simple bit of logic that said if you were coming from the old domain, to pop up a message say hi, we had a name change. Not ideal, but that's the best I could come up with.
Little did I know that the 301 actually transferred the penalty to the new site. Shortly after launching I was hit with a second penalty, and the thought of having to change domain names again was just...it's just wrong. The inconvenience and confusion this creates for users is still being felt to this day. I routinely get emails from users of the first domain asking if I'm the same company.
So yeah, I've been trying here, but my lucks been pretty bad : )
Thank you for the encouraging words! I had no idea that those would work (testing non-roman characters totally slipped my mind). So, I'm really glad they do!
