Slower and unstable. I spent a lot of my freshman year in college on Bitnet chat and iirc about every 30 minutes there would be a "netsplit" and a bunch of folks in the chat would disappear. Maybe it was our universities connection, which I think was direct to UIUC. I've posted here before that back then I thought Bitnet chat was magical. Things like being in a chat room with students in Berlin while the wall was falling felt so futuristic to me.

Much slower. Most campuses in the US were connected with 56K dedicated lines. The NSF backbone had just upgraded to T1.

ftp.wustl.edu would manage about 1 KBps and I was sitting one hop away from it at UIUC.

Insomnia paid off a lot back then.