> Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second
Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilobits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.
> Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second
Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilobits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.
It was very common to be limited to a significantly lower speed. Wikipedia sucks, so I dug up the actual v.34 standard:
Also, remember to assume about 10 bits per byte of actual data, since there is various protocol overhead.That's how I remember it.
For completeness, 33.6 required insane levels of signal clarity on the phone line, and was mostly fiction outside of urban and dense suburban areas.
Prior to 14.4k, there were other generations of modems that came before: 9600, 2400, and even 300 baud modems were all you could get in their respective eras. Each of which were cutting edge at the time.
56K (also called V.90 or "V.everything"), leaned into the quantization that happens on digital phone trunks, rather than let the analog-to-digital conversion chew up your analog modem waveforms. The trick here is that the psuedo-digital-over-analog leg from your house to the local exchange was limited by a few miles. Try this from too far out of town, and it just doesn't work. And to be clear, this was prior to DSL, which is similar but a completely different beast.
Oh, and the V.90 spec was a compromise between two competing 56K standards at the time: K56Flex and X2. This meant that ISPs needed to have matching modems on their end to handle the special 56K signaling. Miraculously, the hardware vendors did something that was good for everyone and compromised on a single standard, and then pushed firmware patches that allowed the two brands to interoperate on existing hardware.
Also, line conditions were subject to a range of factors. It's all copper wire hung from power-poles after all. So, poor quality materials, sloppy workmanship, and aging infrastructure would introduce noise all by itself, and even during weather events. This meant that, for some, it was either a good day or a bad day to try to dial into the internet.
My first modem was 1200... In the early 90's, I got a 9600 baud modem, which is where it felt like things were really taking off. A whole page of text in less than a couple of seconds! I ran my own BBS on 9600 for years.
Going from a 1200 to a 9600 blew my mind- text faster than I could ever hope to read! The future had arrived.
The experience of watching local LLMs produce text has a similar vibe to those old modem links. Everything old is new again.
No Courier, no carrier.
Don't forget the first mass produced consumer modems were 300 baud, and yes we're ignoring the model 37 teletype at 120 baud. Then 1200 baud came soon after for a huge improvement.
Of course we're talking terminal, BBS, and Compuserve users here. AOL was probably grief at those speeds.
> 28.8 kbit/s (the theoretical maximum)
"56k" modems hit the scene (at affordable prices) in ~1998 and 3.2-4.1KB/s were pretty normal. People in high school who "only" had a 28.8 modem were considered dinosaurs by then. We didn't get DSL until ~mid 2000 IIRC
It's not a matter of what the modems were capable of, it's a matter of what the phone line would and could actually carry. Maybe it would be different in a big city, but I don't think I ever saw anybody get over 33.6 before upgrading to DSL.
33.6 was the highest V.90 specified for output over an analog connection. ISPs would have a digital connection the phone company and the signal (ideally) would stay digital until it was turned analog to send over your local loop. This is why it was 33.6kbps up and 56kbps down. I believe the regulatory limit was 53kbps in the US, and it was not uncommon for my modem to negotiate something in the 40s, as we had a somewhat long local loop (hence my RBOC denying us DSL; we had a local loop that was 2 "kilofeet" too long).
I lived in a city but I got a connection at ~48k on a V.90 regularly.
It did depend on line quality, though. We had some kinds of splitters and internal cabling in the house for allowing multiple phones (and eventually the modem), and I remember that prior to some changes made to that, I only used to get up to ~40k.
Modems stopped improving after 56k. I was always excited by the ability to pause the internet while another call came through but like all good things it came too late. And by that time I moved up (and likely was the last to move up).
I was born in 1996, this is like a bedtime story to me. I had AOL as a kid because my family was poor, but I do not remember any of the numbers. Please post more cool stuff like this.
Iirc, most copper lines had a 50kb cap, making 56kb modems liars.
I can't prove this but I somehow remember peaks of up to 48 kilobits per second though never sustained.
I remember being amazed to see download resume right in the browser even as late as 2009 (I was only on dial up u til about 2006).
IIRC limit isn't the copper, it's the CO interconnects with high/low frequency cutoffs, the same copper was used for 1.5Mbps synchronous DSL. For very short runs, 50Mbps VDSL
I remember being SOOOO jealous of my buddy, cause their family got a 28.8 modem! (We were stuck on 16k at the time, IIRC)
I remember getting 5.2 KB/s downloading the Worms 2 demo from Tucows and could practically feel the wind in my hair screaming down the information superhighway...
I remember spending ONE WEEK downloading windows 98. Younger generations will never know the fun of click-and-wait and the thrill of jpgs slowly loading.
A buddy of mine was the reason quotas were set on our shell accounts at our ISP. You could dial in as PPP or just as a regular serial connection to get a login on their BSDI server. He downloaded the Win98 beta to the ISP's server and would ZModem it down from there while the rest of us were sleeping.
Between that and the time I discovered "DISPLAY=<my IP>:0 xdm" worked from our shell account I'm surprised we weren't kicked off the ISP.
I remember downloading Debian 3.0 ISO images over what I think might have been ISDN. I didn't know you didn't need all six or seven CDs in order to install.
(It might also have been slow early DSL. I'm not sure when exactly this was or when the transition happened.)
I was a Slackware guy but I heard good things about Debian. So I tied up our 33.6K modem for three days downloading an ISO. My roommates were pissed but I owned the line.
Then I went to install it and the ISO was corrupted. I never got to try Debian until I joined the Air Force and downloaded it at work.
I remember spending 4 hours downloading the GTA 2 demo on PC. My parents weren't happy with the phone bill later that month. But the wait was so worth it.
I remember downloading the last 2 episodes of Star Trek Voyager of of an FTP server through Windows XP's Explorer. 2 WMV files of 50 megabytes each. Took all night. If a single issue had happened I would have had to start the download all over, but it worked out fine!
I got DSL a few weeks later.
Waited several days to download a half life patch so I could play CS that I got on a cd.
Yeah well I got a hernia installing office ‘97 oh no read error on disc 37 of 44.
On top of that, almost nobody actually connected at 56K. You needed a perfect phone line. Still, compression did help a bit. Dialup latency sucked though. It was 100's of milliseconds.
I had a friend with a 56K ISDN line (data over voice channel) and it was much better performance (10's of milliseconds.)
With my v.92 soft modem, I was able to regularly connect at 48k, and sometimes 53.3k. I never connected at theoretical max of 56k.
Worthwhile to also mention that ISDN was full duplex, instead of half-duplex like dialup. The modems on either end would need to time-slice to allow bi-directional communication, which in a TCP laden world like the web meant that every interaction was orders of magnitude more latent than on ISDN, in which you had symmetrical, full-duplex 56k of bandwidth between you and the ISDN modem. That's the biggest reason why you had a significant decrease in latency.
I also vaguely remember there being FCC power limitations on (some?) 56K modems, limiting them to ~53K max. Also, even with a 56K connection, upload speeds were still limited to 33.6K max.
Fortunately, I got cable internet around 1997 and never looked back.
I remember connecting at 56K. I couldn't afford real 56K modem, but there were cheaper ones that offloaded communication to the CPU. When parents weren't home I was rewiring the socket to connect my modem. So not ideal, but worked. Explaining high bills was fun.
You may have connected at 56K, but it was rare to see in practice. I worked for an ISP and we could see all the stats. We had Ascend Max equipment. To add further confusion, your modem may have been reporting the serial port rate, not the actual line rate.
Same here. I lived in the middle of nowhere but somehow surprisingly close to a remote CO, and I could regularly get 44Kbps connections. My friends were envious.
My "favorite" thing when working tech support was explaining to people in expensive new subdivisions that Southwest Bell saved money by deploying pair gains instead of running more copper, and that's why they were never, ever going to see more than 33.6 (if very lucky) or 28.8 (more likely).
A common trick was to get them to add 3 commas to their dial string. That would prevent their modem from starting to train up until 3 seconds after they finished dialing. That would give our modems time to answer and start the 56K initiation. The delay would cause them to miss that, and then start trying to train up a much more stable 33.6 connection. It capped their max speed but made their connection a lot more reliable.
I lived in the country with pretty poor phone lines, so I'd send my 56k modem a command to limit it to 19.2. If it tried to train up to 28.8, there would be so many bad blocks it'd grind to a stop with all the retransmits until it dropped back to 19.2 anyway, so locking it there worked best.
Makes sense. Just like today my phone shows 5G and full bars, but is as slow as dial up.
Yes! Also, early ISPs were often massively over subscribed. They might have fractional T1 line coming into a POP (example: 384Kbit line) with 100 modems off of it. At peak times, you not only got busy signals, but when you did get through, a slow connection because that upstream pipe was full...
IIRC connecting to the PSTN the best you would ever see was 48kbps, at least in the states, although if you were transferring uncompressed data in the clear sometimes the modem could compress it for you on the fly to get more data on the wire. In practice though big files tended to be compressed already so you rarely saw much benefit from that. You needed some sort of closed phone network that didn't compress the voice channel the way the phone company did in order for the modems to negotiate up to the max.
Winmodems. Bane of the Linux user’s existence at the time.
Yep. And nothing on the packaging to tell you this.
Later on, there were modems that required a CPU with MMX instructions. Dealt with that a lot when I ran my short-lived computer shop.
I made it a policy in '97 to only buy external modems.
A decade after they went off the market I came across one still in the shrink wrap and gag gifted it to a couple of friends. Neither one wanted it for some reason. "Oh, gee, thanks". LOL!
A friend of mine replaced the twisted pair from where it entered his house, to his modem with a piece of coax. He claimed it helped.
True, latency was much better via ISDN. Also we had channel bundling in Germany: 2 x 64 kbit/s. Shared via 10 Mbit/s LAN of course. The hub was a 19 inch beast with fans. Absolutely worked.
Also, 56kbps was the MAX POSSIBLE speed. 48kbps was the maximum speed I ever remember seeing, with somewhere around 42kbps being more common. Occasionally I would connect at 36kbps, see the speed, hang up and try again.
my earliest recollection was 14.4 then came 28.8 then 33.3 and finally 56kbps. In college, mide-late 90s, if we wanted Inet access from our dorm we had to use dial-up but if we went to the lab we could get on the T1 (1.5mbps) which i think was shared with the whole campus. iirc my campus connected to UT-Austin and then they had a T3 (45mbps) to the Internet. ..something like that
Heh, some great memories using the T1 line at the school. In the wild west days we Napster'ed at extreme speeds before someone narked us out 8-)
We intercepted the unencrypted microwave link between campuses, and basked in full ISDN glory.
They never did figure out where all their bandwidth was going, although the boarding house festooned with cat4 was suspicious. They came and snipped some more conspicuous cables, which were of course immediately spliced back together.
They tried to shut the internet down overnight in response, but their DNS level block was a mere roadbump, and in the end they got another ISDN line… which was immediately put to use in the downstairs kitchen VCD factory. Put the Hong Kong kids out of business, as with them you’d have to wait until next term, with us you got your warez tomorrow, with a fried breakfast.
My friend would queue up downloads on his laptop before 1st period, leave the laptop plugged in, sitting in a desk drawer, and pick it up at the end of the day. He had a CD burner, and if we gave him blank media he would burn us his current collection, alphabetized by artist. I still have one CD from that (labeled "Chris Rock" to "Gravity Kills"), that might be the most 1990s thing I own.