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I still have a bunch of proper modems in a box (including some USRs). What I've been planning, is to put up a real live dial-up BBS on a spare land-line I have,

I still have a bunch of proper modems in a box (including some USRs). What I've been planning, is to put up a real live dial-up BBS on a spare land-line I have, so that retro-people can actually play with the built-in modems in old machines. I've done a cursory Google search, and I don't think there are any UK based dial-up-only BBSs still running, so I think it would be a good thing to do. In a few years time, the whole of the UK will be fully switched over to VoIP on the back-end (invisible to the end-user) for all land-lines, which as I understand it will limit modem speeds to about 2,400 baud due to the VoIP compression. So this might be the last chance for [UK] people to experience dial-up at full speeds.

thombat 5y ago
Which also means they won't get to hear the full connection "song" as their modem explores all the different coding and error correction options to negotiate the best connection. A full rack of modems connected to a server made our server room into discordant cathedral, sporadic modem sopranos overloaded on the thrum of the big tape drives bursting writes.
toast0 5y ago
It would depend on the codec they choose. You're definitely getting more delay and jitter regardless, but g.711 is commonly available for voip and is essentially the same encoding as on a t-1/e-1, but with packetization delay (a t-1 multiplexes with one sample per line per sample period, in voip you generally send 20 or 40 or something samples per packet)