[HN Gopher] Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2... ___________________________________________________________________ Should I replace my 56k modem with a 28.8K Modem? (2001) Author : edent Score : 107 points Date : 2023-11-19 14:13 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (forums.anandtech.com) (TXT) w3m dump (forums.anandtech.com) | saithound wrote: | Title should say (2001). Although it's evidently funnier this | way. | RuggedPineapple wrote: | In 2000 or 2001 I ended up having to crash at my high school one | night. Rehearsal had gone late, till 11 or midnight, and I was | stuck. Not that big of a deal, the drama department had | everything I needed. Showers, beds, clothes. It was fine. They | also had a couple computers to control lights and sound stuff, | but they weren't connected to the internet. No worries I thought, | I know all my family's dial up info, I can log in via that. So I | did. I was a little perplexed that it came in under speed (56k | modem, but I was only able to get a 28k or 22k baud connection. I | forget exactly but it was somewhere in that range). I was curious | enough that I asked around with the IT staff the next day and got | confused stares all around, apparently with the types of phone | lines the school had a dial up connection shouldn't have been | possible AT ALL. This was some sort of big deal to the point they | even had to follow up with their telephone provider and there was | some question about if they were bilking the school out of paying | for a certain kind of connection but delivering something else. I | was obviously cut out of the loop at that point but it led to | some high drama behind the scenes. | Waterluvian wrote: | I'm not sure I follow. The service was better than expected? | | In my experience you would pay for a minimum service. When we | paid for 56k dial-up Bell came in and replaced things until we | could achieve 56k. It's just a noise game. So I imagine it's | possible that the existing lines were decent enough to begin | with? | bityard wrote: | My guess is the IT "department" didn't know the difference | between dialup and ISDN. | Moto7451 wrote: | At least in the schools I did volunteer tech support in the | early 00s (in LA, while I was in Middle and High School), | the phones in the classrooms were meant to dial into the | school's own switchboard and not to the outside world. | Maybe that was possible? My supervising teachers always | seemed to walk to the central office to make calls they | didn't want to use their 300 cell phone minutes on | (remember that fun?). | | The school school had ISDN and then T1 and every computer | was networked (even LC IIs) so I don't think anyone would | have bothered trying dialup. In fact, I definitely took | advantage of the fast line to download Linux ISOs and other | things they were ok with me doing in the off instruction | hours. | | We even had a small AirPort installation that came care of | a donation from Universal Studios or Disney. I had a lot of | fun retrofitting an old Rincon 802.11/802.11b card to work | with Apple's Mac OS 8 drivers. | | Good memories I am happy to not reproduce given today's | advancements. | saxonww wrote: | This kind of sounds like the line was provided by PBX and | they didn't expect modems to work well or at all. | don-code wrote: | When I was younger, I connected via 56k modem over the PBX | at my parents' shop. My connection speeds topped out at | 33.6k. | | Under the hood, V.90 (the standard for 56k modems) expects | that there's only a single digital-to-analog conversion, | seen from the ISP's side. The line down from the ISP to the | consumer is digital PCM until the last mile. In the | opposite direction from the consumer back to the ISP, | analog trellis modulation is still used. This is why you | still typically only see 33.6k upload speeds on a V.90 | modem. | | Many PBXes will introduce an additional analog-to-digital | conversion in the unit itself, before converting back to | analog and putting the signal back on the wire to the | street. V.90 can't tolerate that extra conversion, so a | connection at 56k speeds fails, and the modem backs down to | V.34 / 33.6k, which is perfectly usable on a fully analog | line. | RuggedPineapple wrote: | This is 20 year old memories so I may have some of the | details wrong, but the gist was the school had rolled out an | early IP telephony solution and the landlines were just rj-11 | patch cables into a monolithic IP telephony box that assigned | each line a number and shouldn't have been capable of | handling the dial up connection through that | Waterluvian wrote: | Sounds like an interesting mystery. If a human can talk, a | modem can talk. It's analog after all. Maybe the IP | abstraction meant, "there's quantization happening that | makes it technically impossible for a modem to talk at any | sensible baud rate. There's still some circuit switched | stuff going on here that we shouldn't be paying for." | | Now I'm curious to see what baud rate can be achieved over | today's VOIP lines! | bbarnett wrote: | I've used analog fax over SIP in the last few years, with | ulaw, usually very successfully. | | Not sure if it linked at 9600 or what, didn't pay | attention. | epcoa wrote: | > If a human can talk, a modem can talk. It's analog | after all. | | That's an oversimplification, especially for 56k where | the signal isn't analog in the sense of the slower speeds | and uses PAM (pulse amplitude modulation) that is trained | at the beginning of the call (it can be retrained but | that is long and drawn out). Central offices had to be | upgraded and basic u-law quantization meant 56k was a no | go even on most classic POTS lines. There's a bit more to | it than just "noise." | | For VoIP, Amplitude distortion and quantization error | (from multiple sources) means you will never get 56k over | any voip system. Phase distortion and echo cancellation | make other speeds frustrating. Doing better than 9600 is | going to be difficult. | | My guess is the OP was not dealing with an IP system | (sounds less likely for a school in 2000). In any event | they noted they could not achieve 56k which is expected | that they were not able to establish a PAM link over the | PBX, but the channel was good enough for analog FSK | modulation. That they could have achieved 28k pretty much | rules out any IP system with an ATA of that vintage . | ghaff wrote: | Way back when my dad had an analog POTS connection at his | rural Maine house. It worked fine for voice calls but it | was flaky to non-existent for a modem connection, to | which the telco basically went <shrug>. | toast0 wrote: | If you go back in time, you want to test it with faxing, | if it doesn't work for data modem, it probably doesn't | work well for faxing, and if it doesn't work for faxing, | the telco might actually fix it. | FrankPetrilli wrote: | > For VoIP, Amplitude distortion and quantization error | (from multiple sources) means you will never get 56k over | any voip system | | https://frank.petril.li/posts/dialup-adventures-1/ | | I've done V.90 over VoIP. In a very controlled | environment that was tuned for it, but VoIP nonetheless. | The main issue is that VoIP timing, even with deep | buffers, is prone to more jitter than a PDH network and | the phase drift will eventually cause enough errors to | force a retrain every few minutes. Either way, "never" is | a little too absolute IMHO. :) | epcoa wrote: | Fair enough. How about V.92? Have you had a setup where | upstream PCM could be successfully established? | FrankPetrilli wrote: | Good question - it's been almost two years since this | project so I don't recall whether V.92 came up at all, | even on a pure T-1 setup. I still have all the gear, if I | set it up and run it again I'll update this thread. | simfree wrote: | What gear were you using? | RuggedPineapple wrote: | I think this is exactly right for reasons that weren't | important to the base story. The year after the story | they moved to these Cisco VoIP phones that plugged into | Ethernet directly, which seems odd considering they had | just recently moved onto what was supposedly a Telco | provided IP phone service. I suspect someone either | misunderstood what they were buying or someone | misrepresented what they were selling. They moved to what | they thought they were getting in the first place and | dropped the telco entirely. | | For schools of that time, there was an incredible amount | of money flowing around in the dot-com era. At least for | a high school in a state capital. Both Microsoft and | Cisco sponsored classes and teachers for them at my | school. I got semesters A and B of my CCNA as a credit | giving elective. My first time using Linux was | (ironically) in the Microsoft sponsored class. | epc wrote: | The school was likely using ISDN or some sort of digital phone | setup and you lucked out. Hotels used to have a special data | port on the room handset that you could use because the main | line was digital (either ISDN or something else). Even then I | could typically only get 28-33k, not the 53k (I never, ever got | a pure 56k connection). | __MatrixMan__ wrote: | Cables are rated for data with a certain expectation of abuse. | On a straight run, cat-5 UTP and cat-6 UTP are identical even | though the former is rated for 100Mps and the latter for | 10Gbps. | | But if you bend them around a corner and pull the cable tight, | the pairs in the cat-5 will become separated while the pairs in | the cat-6 will stay mostly paired (electrons running in | opposite directions create fields which negate each other, this | is spoiled if the stands separate. Then the cable becomes | noisy). | | It would be similar with baud rates and phone lines. Probably | the school's setup wasn't of the sort that could typically | handle data, so the telco had offered them some kind of | expensive alternative, but the installers had had a gentle | touch, so it actually could handle data. | | That, or the telco was just lying and trying to sell something | the customer didn't need. Wouldn't be the first time that had | happened. | rr808 wrote: | Its a big deal if a school computer network that wasn't | connected to the internet suddenly you open up a direct route | with no firewall or security. | dwringer wrote: | I know it wasn't the same everywhere, but back in 2001 my | high school had an IT staff that consisted of a single | teacher with no real technical literacy to begin with. There | was no real sort of firewall or security, including the | computers that were on the internet. It was kind of a | different time. | fgonzag wrote: | I can hazzard a guess you weren't around back then. Computers | weren't something everyone depended on... They were novelties | oogali wrote: | My guess is the telecom vendor your school selected told your | school's IT and purchasing teams that their new phone lines | cannot handle modem connections, so they would be obligated to | buy a separate IP connectivity service from the same vendor. | | Being the early 90s, technical expertise about Internet | connectivity was sparse and they most likely entered into a | contract with this vendor on the strength of their statement. | | They were now surprised to find out the truth: that they | could've kept using their existing paid-for modems instead of | upgrading to a new, expensive, high-speed Internet, access | circuit tied to a multi-year contract and all the requisite | equipment that came along with that. | jeffrallen wrote: | Definitely, dude. You were much more likely to get a stable and | reliable connection from a hardware modem at a slower speed than | from a soft modem that was trying for 56 kbits on a bad voice | line. | | If anyone wants to brush up on their understanding of the Nyquist | theorem, give yourself homework to find out why the highest speed | ever offered on analog phone lines was 56 kbits. That's a nice | Rabbit Hole to tour. | retrac wrote: | Channel capacity is b * log2 (1 + snr) where b is the bandwidth | in Hz and snr is the linear signal-to-noise ratio. | | The voice passband in the old telephone system is 3 kHz. And 60 | dB SNR average over the passband was typical for a clear voice | channel: 3000 * log2 1000000 = 59,800 bits | per second. | pixl97 wrote: | Heh, where I lived 56k modems were useless. The telephone | infrastructure was already using some kind of cheat where they | effectively doubled up the number of voice calls that went over | a single wire (and I can't for the life of me remember what | this is called now). The most you could ever get would be 28.8, | but more likely you'd get 24,000. | don-code wrote: | You're probably thinking of robbed bit signaling: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbed_bit_signaling | | This wasn't quite doubling. Five out of six frames were | sampled at full 8-bit resolution, while the remaining frame | was sampled at 7-bit resolution (hence the "robbed bit"). The | "doubling" is probably that you could run 24 digital lines | with the 7/8-bit encoding, over the wires used by just two | analog phone lines. | marcus0x62 wrote: | Robbed bit signaling was (is) used to encode signaling | information on a digital circuit (typically a T1 in North | America) without a dedicated signaling channel. There were | a variety of multiplexing systems to get more than a single | line on a copper pair, but they didn't have anything to do | with robbed bit signaling. | ac29 wrote: | The linked forum thread talks about this, its called pair | gain. | awiesenhofer wrote: | If anyone else is curious now, this is one of the first Google | results I found and quite the delightful, in-depth read | explaining it: | | https://www.10stripe.com/articles/why-is-56k-the-fastest-dia... | zzzcsgo wrote: | Those winmodems... Had a lot of issues with them, specially under | Linux. I tried to avoid them like the plague. | underseacables wrote: | When I was 14 there was a power outage at Barnes & Noble. That's | how I got my 28.8 modem. | ksherlock wrote: | For those that don't remember, a winmodem (aka softmodem) was | smaller and cheaper because the modulation / demodulation was | handled in software with host CPU and RAM. Using an external | modem would free up CPU and RAM since it's handled in hardware. | doubloon wrote: | further radicalizing the open source movement. this was a | massive deal with linux people back then since it threatened to | shut linux off the internet, which would kill it. (if you take | the idea to the extreme as young people do, that every network | hardware device would soon require single-source proprietary | software from a monopolistic corporation). | rascul wrote: | Old, surprised it's still up, and related: | | http://www.linmodems.org/ | throitallaway wrote: | Holy heck, I remember using that. I'm so glad that the days | of IRQ conflicts, Winmodems, etc. are past us. | netsharc wrote: | I wonder how it is nowadays, PCI(e) sound cards are no longer a | thing and are mostly on the motherboard (ok well the on-board | chips are probably more powerful than chips on sound cards from | x years ago), AMD's on-CPU GPU are quite powerful too. My | network card^W chip has an option to off-load checksum | calculations. | | Seems like there's enough spare CPU cycles even if some of them | have been used for your written-in-Javascript IDE and written- | in-Javascript messaging client. | giantrobot wrote: | It's less about total cycles and more about scheduling. You | don't really want a real-time or low latency thing like sound | to get preempted by another process. | | One of the problems with WinModems was they were sensitive to | CPU load. In the nominal "browsing" case they might be fine, | the average webpage wasn't going to load down the system too | much. With something like gaming where the system was more | stressed the modem could have weird latency issues or the | driver could even crash. | justsomehnguy wrote: | Or have shitty drivers what would insert garbage in the | received data, bad threading and memory management I | supposec | | I still have mp3s with botched (and very audible) grabled | parts, corrupted at downdload. | dicriseg wrote: | I was doing dialup internet support when these things hit the | market. What a fucking mess. It's 25 years later and I still | get anxious when the phone rings, because my brain thinks it | might be a senior citizen who can't connect after they got a | good deal on a new computer. Sometimes we could get them back | on line with an init string, but often they needed new drivers. | Walking someone through either of those over the phone was | brutal. | | Getting online as easily as we do today is nothing I will ever | take for granted! | ryandrake wrote: | I also briefly worked in Student IT support junior year of my | university and "Winmodem" sent similar chills down my spine. | An idea that never should have happened! | | You can boil a lot of tech changes down to either A: Let's | take this problem that has been solved in hardware and move | it to software! and B: Let's take this problem that has been | implemented in software and bake it into hardware. | | Somehow, A is always a train wreck, and B usually pushes the | abstraction stack upward and moves the industry forward. Yet, | we as an industry keep trying A and expecting good results. | dicriseg wrote: | Yeah, in the case of winmodems/softmodems, it was because A | is cheaper. Or, at least, you could externalize the costs. | | In our case, we technically did not support your hardware - | you had to show up with a working modem. But in practice, | if you want to retain your customers, you need to support | their hardware. At one point we used to have CDs full of | known good drivers for all of the common softmodems that | we'd send out if we couldn't figure out a configuration | workaround. Even then, I had a handful of discussions with | folks where I basically told them that their thing wasn't | going to work - they either needed a different modem, of | which we'd recommend a few that we knew some stores | carried, or they needed to find a way to cut down their | line noise. I'm one of those types that takes it a little | bit personally when I spend a bunch of time on something | and still can't solve it, so that always sucked. Maybe you | could say that wasn't strictly the modem's fault, but even | the cheapest hardware modems had better tolerance for line | noise. | ryandrake wrote: | I think a lot of the problem was how difficult it was for | the average computer user to tell the difference between | a real modem and a Winmodem. Some manufacturers | deliberately failed to distinguish them in marketing, | pretending they were both "modems". Retailers were in on | the scam, too. The whole puddle got muddied to the point | where a savvy consumer needed to keep a whitelist of | "real modem" make and model numbers with them going to | the store. You could usually tell by the price, though, | as you say they were cheap (garbage). | dicriseg wrote: | This is unlocking memories for me. I think we used to | tell folks something like "If it's under $50 and Walmart | sells it, that's a winmodem" or something like that. | | In theory, one of the selling points was that as | standards changed, you would just upgrade your | drivers/software and not buy a new modem. That probably | made a lot of sense if you bought a USR Winmodem, but | those $20 unbranded models were lucky to ever see an | update. If you were lucky, you had a reference model and | could use the OEM drivers which did occasionally get | updated. But by the time these things came about, | V.90/V.92 existed, and dialup standards were kind of | frozen in that 56k-if-you-were-lucky state. There wasn't | anything to upgrade to - you got DSL if you wanted more | bandwidth over POTS lines, or you went to cable. | | Also I could be completely full of shit on the above. | These are memories from 16-18 year old me. | Scoundreller wrote: | Took maaaaaaany hours to for tech support to figure out why | my $$$ 33.6k external modem worked sloooooooow. Often took | them a lot of convincing that it was actually slow, a lot of | early internet users had higher expectations, but I was | coming from 2400bps service. Bazillions of failed packets | reported in Windows Dial Up Networking. | | Finally found the person that figured it out. Computer only | had an 8250 UART for the serial port. $35 ISA serial port | card with 16550A UART solved it! | dicriseg wrote: | This was definitely when tech support could still be fun. | We didn't have tiers or scripts or anything, just a handful | of people on shift answering calls. You kind of loved when | you got one like this when the customer calling in also had | a good attitude about it. Probably because you knew the | call was going to eat up at least a quarter of your shift, | and you got to think a little. It sure beat the 10th time | that day you were walking someone through uninstalling and | reinstalling TCP/IP on Win95/98/ME. | | All these years later I really do still have anxiety when | the phone rings, though. I have an irrational fear of | picking up even when it's, like, my dad, or picking up the | phone and having to call a business to ask a question or | something. | | Do you happen to remember what sort of system you had that | still had an 8250 but extended into the >14.4kbps era? Was | this just a super old machine in the mid 1990's, or | something in the 486+ range and the motherboard | manufacturer had a lot of late 80's chip stock? | Scoundreller wrote: | I suspect they enjoyed talking to me because I sounded | like a young woman (in a ~12 year old boy's body). | | It was a no-name 486 DX2 66MHz from "Consumer's | Distributing" (defunct soviet-style Canadian retailer), | and a cheap model at that. 8250 was probably a cost- | cutting measure they felt like they could get away with. | | Most people probably bought internal modems so these UART | issues wouldn't pop up. But we had bad experiences with | IRQ conflicts locking up the mouse on a previous | computer. Not an issue with Lynx/Pine/etc, but we wanted | GUI and Netscape, so we were trying to avoid that. Unsure | if our go-external plan made sense or not (does an | internal hardware modem run its own UART or communicate | over ISA to the board's serial port?). | | It was a lot of calls, so I dutifully reinstalled the | drivers and tried a lot of dialer strings. | dicriseg wrote: | > Unsure if our go-external plan made sense or not (does | an internal hardware modem run its own UART or | communicate over ISA to the board's serial port?). | | Internal hardware modems had their own UART. A lot of | them had DIP switches or jumpers where you'd set the IRQ | and COM port. You needed to set them to a free IRQ/COM | pair. | | This will take you back in time: https://support.usr.com/ | support/5685/5685-files/spvc336.pdf | Scoundreller wrote: | It was probably unusual for this ISP to deal with a | bargain basement computer, but a premium external modem, | and the incompatibilities that can result. | giraffe333 wrote: | Worked at AOL tech support back in the day and I also still | have the occasional flashback to the pain these so called | modems caused us all. | dayjah wrote: | I worked at a non-AOL ISP as tech support back in the day | and still have the occasional flashback to having to talk | folks through uninstalling the custom TCP/IP stack the "Try | AOL" CDs would install. | dicriseg wrote: | There needs to be a special kind of therapist for people | like us. | blackhaz wrote: | I have a collection of retro stuff from my childhood - an | XT, a 386DX-40, Pentium-133, a bunch of hard drives, | motherboards, video and sound cards, and so on... I really | love all this retro stuff. But one night on eBay I've | stumbled upon the modem I've had - the MultiTech 28.8k. I | didn't buy it. | ryoshu wrote: | I was around for the gold master of AOL 5.0 (Kilimanjaro). | After the release we were pulled into a conference room to | get on a call with Steve Case. You don't want to get on a | call with the CEO immediately after a launch. It turns out | our execs were installing 5.0 and then... couldn't get | online. It hung with the modem init. As the person in | charge of the QA lab I pulled all of our test run data. | Couldn't duplicate on any of the dozens of machines. Sr. | devs were running debuggers. Didn't see anything on their | machines. We went into the office of our highest-level exec | and borrowed his laptop. | | Winmodem. Dev hooked up a debugger and found the issue. | There was a bug in the soft modem driver. Hot fix was | released, but it was too late for the pressed CDs. Luckily | it was an edge case on high-end laptops. That were issued | to all of our execs with the buggy driver. | | Good times. | jwells89 wrote: | "Winmodem" brings back memories of the dirt cheap Celeron-based | Compaq Presario minitower my parents bought at the very tail | end of 1999 as a quick replacement a 1996 Mac tower that had | its hard drive fail. | | What a miserable machine that thing was. It might've been an | upgrade on paper but between Windows 98 and the terrible | hardware it was running on, it was a hopelessly crashy buggy | mess that rendered any performance advantages it had over the | Mac entirely moot. | | Within a span of 6 months we sold it and replaced it with a | Dell Dimension 4100 that cost 3x as much and was much much | better, especially after replacing its stock 98SE install with | Win2K. We never bought bargain basement computers again after | that. | krooj wrote: | Our family went through the same thing with a budget Celeron | "MDG" computer running Windows 98. Awful. Keep in mind that, | like you, I had previously used a IIsi and an LC630, so I | figured... 300MHz, must be amazing?!? | | At some point later, my high school had surplus Powermac | 7500/100s that were gifted from Nortel and I managed to snag | one, paired it with a USR 56k external modem and it was a | million times better than that Celeron econobox. | comprev wrote: | For me it brings back great memories of the first PC my folks | bought for the family home where they asked _me_ what spec | I'd like (Pentium 4, 256MB RAM, 30GB disk, 17" CRT, | Soundblaster Live! 5.1, Creative Labs 5.1 speakers). One | might say it was the catalyst to what became my career - and | love of gaming! | chrsig wrote: | freeing cpu/ram generally wasn't the motivator to get a | hardware modem. winmodems required drivers that generally were | only available for windows ("win"modem) | | at a consumer level, the only people that ever knew or cared | were people trying to run linux or a bsd. h/w modems operated | over a serial port, and didn't require any special kernel | support. | abirch wrote: | That's how I learned about the kernel and modules. That and | getting a CD ROM to work. | bhumihang wrote: | Funbhbnjhh | dehrmann wrote: | I just remember winmodem drivers always being finicky and | rarely working. | comprev wrote: | Buying an external US Robotics 56k modem allowed me to get | online with RedHat 8 (boxset purchased from Amazon, IIRC), as | the PC I had contained a PCI Win-modem with no compatible Linux | drivers. It was a friend at school who introduced me to Linux. | Surfing the web at home on Linux in the early 00s felt like I | was in niche club :-) | 1letterunixname wrote: | Back in the day, Central Computer carried packaged RedHat and | clear vinyl Slackware CD sets. One of the few brick and | mortar computer and software store regional chains that still | exist in the US, the other being MicroCenter. | | https://centralcomputer.com | | https://www.microcenter.com | | I worked at Egghead Software in high school and managed NFR | pricing on Netcom. Egghead was one of the first chains to go | under because it couldn't compete with the hypermarts like | CompUSA and Fry's Electronics, both of which are now also | defunct given way to BestBuy and Amazon. | 1letterunixname wrote: | Yep. Softmodems were hot garbage because they were generally | Windows only. | | Gimme a Courier 56k or give me AOL at 75 baud. | wkat4242 wrote: | It also made your PC slow and crappy in general and they didn't | work with real OSes. And they would often fail or crap out when | you were doing something else (most windows was still DOS based | and not fully multitasking back in those days) Yuck. Bottom of | the barrel stuff. | MichaelRo wrote: | I never had a modem. In 2000 I was attending University living in | a student hostel which had Internet by grace of allocated state | budget. It was horrifyingly slow. No idea what the original | connection was, but distributed through coaxial cable Ethernet to | hundreds of students rooms, it was barely usable. Also I had no | idea what I was doing, porn was one thing if by that you | understand navigating webrings on Altavista and leaving one image | to download overnight hoping by morning at least it starts to | show something. First time I saw real Internet on my first job in | 2001, a satellite downlink connection at 256 Kbit/sec (uplink was | a regular modem), I couldn't believe such speed was possible. | | On the other hand the local LAN was a nonstop LAN-party, reaching | peak usage during exams season, when everyone should have been | learning but obviously they were hardly doing that between | Counterstrike rounds and such. | mkoryak wrote: | Ah this brings back some memories.. I forgot all about having to | connect to the Internet every day and how I could tell by the | sounds the modulator demodulator made if the connection was going | to succeed | tomhoward wrote: | My first full time job was doing phone tech support for dialup | internet users for one of Australia's biggest ISPs in the late | 90s. Many of the customers who'd call had just bought a new big- | brand desktop PC (most commonly a HP Pavillion) with a winmodem | in it, and so our job was to get it to work, even if their phone | line was bad, or had other devices (fax machines, alarms, | wireless phones) causing interference. We became very very | familiar with the AT command sets to adjust the settings on all | the different modem models, and with winmodems you'd often just | have to slow it right down to 33k, 28k or even less. | fnordpiglet wrote: | AT+MS=V34,1,2400,28800,2400,28800 | bbarn wrote: | Man, this brings back memories - but I'm a little surprised 2001 | is appended to the title. In the mid-90's I got my first 56K | modem and expected a world of faster connections only to realize | every BBS I was on didn't support it anyway. | | By 2001 I think I had cable service, and most people in my area | could get it (suburb of Chicago at the time) | theodric wrote: | Metros got the good stuff earlier! The little rural town in | Illinois where I grew up, Bushnell, only got local dialup in | early 1997, and something approximating broadband in | about...2010(? I left in 2001); even that was lastmiled with | wireless. I knew the guy that ran the dialup ISP. They managed | to get a T1 to the bank HQ downtown and put their modem banks | there. 33.6 when they launched, 53k a little later on, and I | rarely saw it handshake faster than about 46k. But we were glad | of every kilobit. | Moto7451 wrote: | Even in LA I don't think I saw much more than a brief burst | of 53K. It really needed everything lined up correctly and my | old building with too many party lines was a noisy mess. | ac29 wrote: | 56k wasnt standardized until 2000, though the draft was | available a little earlier. There was also the very short lived | K56flex and X2 technologies that came out in 1997, but ISP | support and sales were pretty low. | marcus0x62 wrote: | It would have been difficult (expensive) for a BBS to support | 56k. The calling side modem could be on an analog POTS line, | but the called side needed a digital circuit, usually a PRI (T1 | with ISDN signaling.) It was far easier for them to support | 64/128kbps ISDN -- all they needed was one or more dual-channel | BRI lines. | throw555chip wrote: | It's not related I guess but I remember connecting to CompuServe | in 1983 with a 300 Baud modem to catch up on the digital world. | andix wrote: | If I remember correctly back then in the US local phone calls and | also dial up wasn't charged per minute. What a heavenly place, we | had to pay around 2$ per hour, which added up a lot if you wanted | to go online for 2 hours every day. | | Then in 2000 DSL started to be available. Not billed per minute | anymore, but per megabyte. 1GB was included per month and then it | was around 7ct per megabyte. So once again very expensive. And | no, there were no alternative providers available back then. | Scoundreller wrote: | My big bad national ISP used the same PPPoE authentication for | dialup and DSL. So you could buy an unlimited dialup account | and use those hours on DSL and chew through as much data as you | wanted. Later on, some independent ISPs sold logins+passwords | that you could use over the "Bell" DSL service and connect | through them for unlim data. | | (I initially hated it when they switched their DSL service to | PPPoE over whatever they had before, because the PPPoE overhead | sucked up like 10-15% of your throughput... until I decided to | run a little test...) | marcus0x62 wrote: | ISPs in the US initially used unmetered access to compete | against legacy services like Compuserv that charged per-minute. | It also helped that they didn't typically incur per-minute | charges on their phone lines, and after 1997 or so, could buy | heavily subsidized lines from startup competitive telephone | companies (who in turn typically WERE collecting a per-minute | charge when the end users called into those lines from the | legacy local telephone company.) Once an ISP got big enough | they could connect to the SS7 network and buy inter machine | trunks. Those did have per-minute costs, and very high startup | costs, but they were so cheap compared to even the subsidized | T1/PRI prices it didn't really matter. | h2odragon wrote: | "Software modem" resource: | https://projects.osmocom.org/projects/retro-bbs/wiki/Softwar... | dep_b wrote: | When I worked at an Internet Helpdesk I routinely "downgraded" | V90 modems to V34 using AT+MS=V34 or AT+MS=11. Would connect much | quicker, more stable and the effective speed was exactly the | same. | | V90 was really stretching the audible phone spectrum to the max | and any type of analog disruption would render it effectively | useless. | ceautery wrote: | Modem manufacturers were between a rock and a hard place back | then. It was already expensive to have hardware chips that | supported every available connection protocol, and the extra | horsepower you needed to support, say, BTLZ error correction had | to come from somewhere. So either add more hardware to the modem, | or offload that work to the slow computer CPUs of the late 90s | (when Winmodems first came out) which weren't up for the task. | | I was in tech support when winmodems first hit the scene. The | best I could do for my users then was to configure their init | strings to use "buffered async" mode (&Q6 on an RPI modem, I | forget what it was for the Sportster winmodems) instead of error | correction. | | Unrelated, poor Shawn. I wish I could have jumped on a 10 minute | phone call with him back then to troubleshoot his external modem | before he started spamming the forum and got himself banned. | Scoundreller wrote: | He got banned several months later. Difficult to see why (maybe | posts removed)? But a lot of people used "password" or whatever | as their password in 2001, so not unusual to see old accounts | axed. | aaronkjones wrote: | My first job was with a local, rural ISP in 2001. I convinced the | boss to let me have an additional account and I payed for a | second phone line. Initially I used some software (on Windows | 2000) to perform modem bonding (shotgun modem) with two modems. | Then, eventually upgraded to Diamond Supra Sonic II 112k. It of | course never reached 112k obviously but I was riding that high | for quite a while. | sonar_un wrote: | I still remember the modem string that I always used. | | AT &F &C1 &D2 &Q5 &K0 S46=0 | exabrial wrote: | I think I got an actual 56k connection once, felt like a | millionaire. | | 38.4k about 70% of the time, and 28k 20% or 14.4 the remaining | 10%. | 1letterunixname wrote: | And Flex vs. X2 before V.90. | keithnz wrote: | I used to dial up to a vax in terminal mode circa 1991 with a | 2400 baud modem. But sometimes it would connect at 300.... which | was painful. Not to mention there was only limited lines in so it | could take a while to get a connection, so even if you did | connect at 300, you'd often just put up with it. | | Was a cool time, no one really knew anything about the internet | then and it felt like this awesome "secret world" that connected | you to the rest of the world! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-19 23:00 UTC)