4 ms·
I remember how excited I was when I bought my usr 56k modem. I imaged how awesome it would be to download faster than 3.2k/s!! I plugged that bad boy in, and di
by mkoryak 5y ago
I remember how excited I was when I bought my usr 56k modem. I imaged how awesome it would be to download faster than 3.2k/s!! I plugged that bad boy in, and discovered that due to the phone lines in my area, I could now download at about 3.3k/s.
- hasmanean 5y agoSure you mean 3.3KiloBytes per second. That would be about 30 kilobits per second.
- iso1210 5y agoYes, if a 56k modem was running at full tilt you could get around 5kbytes per second. Downloading SG1 episodes back in 2000 over a 56k modem was not quite the streaming experience we take for granted today :D
- waynesonfire 5y agoi'd have to download midi files for music. :-)
- rasz 5y agoLets not forget about V.42bis 4:1 best case compression ratio. V.92 upgraded to 6:1 V.44, but nobody used those anymore.
- jqcoffey 5y agoI worked for a local ISP in the 90’s and can tell you you were not the only one. In my memory 56k modems were rarely reliably better than 33.6ks. Myself I seem to recall feeling luck to get around 40k connections.
- hirako2000 5y agosame experience, France had decent phone lines for audio, but the bandwidth 56k provided over those lines were rarely stable, falling even below 1kB wasn't uncommon.
- gregmac 5y agoI definitely remember redialing multiple times to try to get both a modem from the 56k bank (my ISP had a mix while switching over), and a connection going as fast as possible. I don't remember whether the max speeds I got were, but when downloading a "big" multi-MB file it was worth it to get a faster connection.