first platform in Ireland to offer users access to e-mail outside of a corporate setting. Despite being cutting edge for its time, the system failed to capture a large market and was ultimately withdrawn due to lack of commercial interest. The rise of the internet and other global online services in the early to mid-1990s played a major factor in the death of Irish Minitel. The service eventually ended by the end of the 1990s.. Minitel Ireland's terminals were technically identical to their French counterparts, except that they had a QWERTY keyboard and an RJ-11 telephone jack which is the standard telephone connector in Ireland. Terminals could be rented for 5.00 Irish pounds (6.35 euro) per month or purchased for 250.00 Irish pounds (317.43 euro) in 1992. Minitel With the French Minitel system, unlike any other service, the users were given an entire custom designed terminal for free. This was a deliberate move on the part of France Telecom, which reasoned that it would be cheaper in the long run to give away free terminals and teach its customers how to look up telephone listings on the terminal, instead of continuing to print and ship millions of phone books each year. Once the network was in place, commercial services started to sprout up, becoming very popular in the mid-1980s. By 1990 tens of millions of terminals were in use. Like Prestel, Minitel used an asymmetric modem (1200-bit/s for downloading information to the terminal and 75-bit/s back). Alex Bell Canada introduced Minitel to Quebec as Alex in 1988, and Ontario two years later. It was available both as a standalone CRT terminal (very similar in design to the ADM-3A) with 1200-bit/s modem, and as software-only for MS-DOS computers. The system was received enthusiastically thanks to a free two-month introductory period, but fizzled within two years. Online fees were very high, and the useful services such as home banking, restaurant reservations, and news feeds, that Bell Canada advertised did not materialise; within a very short time the majority of content on Alex was of poor quality or very expensive chat lines. The Alex terminals did double duty for connecting to text-only BBSes. Minitel in Brazil A very successful system was started in São Paulo, Brazil, by then state-owned Telesp (Telecomunicações de São Paulo). It was called Videotexto and operated from 1982 to the mid-nineties; a few other state telephone companies followed Telesp's