Editing FidoNet (section)

===Decline===
{{unreferenced section|date=February 2018}}
As modems reached speeds of 28.8&nbsp;kbit/s, dial-up Internet became increasingly common. By 1995, the bulletin board market was reeling as users abandoned local BBS systems in favour of a subscription to a local Internet Provider, which allowed access to worldwide internet services, such as HTTP, internet mail and so on, for the same cost as accessing a local BBS system. Many BBS sysops became Internet Service Providers. Their Internet gateways also made FidoNet less expensive to implement, because inter-net transfers could be delivered over the Internet as well, at little or no marginal cost. But this seriously diluted the entire purpose of the store-and-forward model, which had been built up specifically to address a long-distance problem that no longer existed.

The FidoNet nodelist started shrinking, especially in areas with a widespread availability of internet connections. This downward trend continues but has levelled out at approximately 2,500 nodes.<ref group=N>The exact number can be determined by examining the official nodelist. However, the format is difficult to parse and many systems deliberately appear more than once, in different sections. The 2,500 node limit is an estimate made by the current maintainer as of 2013, Janis Kracht.</ref> FidoNet remains popular in areas where Internet access is difficult to come by, or expensive.