The vast majority of our traffic was done by people while they were at work. It was actually pretty funny how most of our traffic came in on Monday mornings and then went down from there and then the weekends were unbelievably dead.
Beyond that, 1998 wasn't exactly the dark ages. I knew plenty of people that had cable modems in 1996. I had an ISDN line myself in 1996 and a DSL line in either 1998 or 1999. There were plenty of options for people back then that didn't live in the middle of nowhere. And call waiting took care of letting calls through unless the person explicitly disabled it. Heck, any time I had dialup I had two or more phone lines and I had a cell phone since 1994.
But you're right - like all solutions it wasn't 100% perfect but it sure helped tremendously.
Beyond that, 1998 wasn't exactly the dark ages. I knew plenty of people that had cable modems in 1996. I had an ISDN line myself in 1996 and a DSL line in either 1998 or 1999. There were plenty of options for people back then that didn't live in the middle of nowhere. And call waiting took care of letting calls through unless the person explicitly disabled it. Heck, any time I had dialup I had two or more phone lines and I had a cell phone since 1994.
But you're right - like all solutions it wasn't 100% perfect but it sure helped tremendously.