Summary

  • In December 1995, JTB described four dial-up plans: a Student option and three numbered plans. Each paired a monthly subscription with a dollar-denominated “Free Traffic” amount; use beyond that amount cost 10 cents per minute at peak or 5 cents off-peak.
  • The surviving message does not name the currency or explain what accounting unit “traffic” represented. It records the offer, not household affordability, actual bills, connection quality or how subscribers behaved.

A surviving message from BruNet’s Network Operations Centre makes the early Internet in Brunei unusually tangible. On 6 December 1995, an operator at the Telecommunications Department of the Ministry of Communication sent a list of dial-up charges to Steven Huter, then associated with the Network Startup Resource Center. The note began plainly: “We have 4 plans to be chosen by the subscriber.” It then set out more than four monthly prices. It described a way of dividing Internet use into a subscription, a stated allowance of traffic value and an additional charge that depended on the time of day. (JTB email preserved by NSRC, 6 December 1995)

The table names a Student plan and Plans 1, 2 and 3. Their monthly subscriptions were shown as $8, $15, $45 and $165 respectively. Alongside them, the column headed “Free Traffic” showed $30 for Student, $30 for Plan 1, $96 for Plan 2 and $384 for Plan 3. That wording and notation matter. The source expresses the traffic amounts in dollars, not megabytes or minutes. It does not say whether the amount was a cash credit, a tariff value assigned to some quantity of use, or another billing construct. The safest reading is the one the table permits: these were dollar-denominated traffic values included with the monthly plan.

The next rule makes the schedule more distinctive. For traffic over the included amount, the email lists $0.10 per minute during a peak window from Monday through Saturday, 6 a.m. to 6:59 p.m. It lists $0.05 per minute off-peak, from 7 p.m. to 5:59 a.m. on Monday through Saturday, and on Sundays and public holidays. The schedule prices the same additional minute differently depending on when it occurred. A subscriber therefore faced both a plan choice and a clock. The document does not show whether people shifted their usage to the cheaper period, but it made the incentive legible.

The listed access charge was not the whole cost of joining or changing plans. JTB also quoted a one-time $20 registration fee and a $10 administrative charge for any plan change. These are small lines in the message, but they show that the tariff had a fixed entry cost and a switching cost as well as recurring and usage-linked charges. The source does not state whether telephone-line rental, local call charges, taxes, modem equipment or other costs were included.

The currency remains uncertain. Every amount is marked with $, but the email never says whether that means Brunei dollars, US dollars or another currency. Later Brunei sources often use “B$” or “BND” when identifying the local currency; that later convention cannot supply a missing label in a 1995 price list. This article preserves the original symbol rather than converting it.

The phrase “free traffic” also resists an easy modern translation. The archived page contains a damaged line immediately before the table that appears to mention “2 MB of disk space,” but its wording is garbled. It does not clarify the traffic column and is not used here. Without a clean original billing specification, it would be misleading to rewrite the four dollar values as data caps. Nor does the message reveal whether the plan’s traffic value was consumed by time online, data volume or a particular combination of services.

The tariff arrived as BruNet was being introduced, but even the launch chronology depends on which source is consulted. A July 1996 account in the government newspaper Pelita Brunei says the service had been officially launched on 10 October 1995 and that about 2,000 users, including students, had used it since then. A 2002 government newspaper report instead says BruNet had 819 subscribers when introduced in August 1995 and 13,860 by 1999. A later Ministry of Information overview dates the Department of Telecommunications’ establishment of BruNet to October 1995. These may refer to different milestones, but the records do not reconcile them; the dates should remain attributed rather than collapsed into one. (Pelita Brunei, 3 July 1996; Pelita Brunei, 27 February 2002; Brunei in Brief)

Those later user counts cannot tell us whether the 1995 tariff was affordable, whether one plan dominated, or how much traffic subscribers used. They establish that public accounts described adoption as growing, while the December email documents the operator’s menu. A price schedule is evidence of the service’s proposed operating rules, not a demand survey.

The history here is therefore narrower, but more revealing, than a single launch date. BruNet presented access as a set of choices with different fixed commitments, included traffic values, time-sensitive overage rates and charges for entry or plan changes. It is an early example of how a dial-up service’s commercial boundary could be written into a tariff. The record does not show how every subscriber experienced that boundary. It does show that access was being priced through more than one monthly number.

Sources