Interesting information w.r.t. UK telephone practices! In the USA, it was usual to get free local calls, so ISPs would set up modem banks to try and get maximum

Interesting information w.r.t. UK telephone practices! In the USA, it was usual to get free local calls, so ISPs would set up modem banks to try and get maximum coverage for a given NPA-NXX range. There was some arrangement with CLECs and ILECs where it was extremely profitable for IIRC CLECs to pass data-only calls through to ILECs, so one or the other was subsidizing a lot of the early dialin ISPs, to the point of buying them modem banks and whatnot! That was probably one of the biggest death-bringers for the BBS era, no more long distance calls to get to what you wanted. > Which was hugely frustrating because we had a voicemail variant that was hosted by the telco, and let you know you had messages waiting by pulsing the dialtone. And my modem did not recognise the pulsed dialtone as a valid dialtone, and refused to connect until we called the number and marked them read. Yeah, some VM providers in the USA did that too, and it similarly confused modems. It's called "stutter dialtone" here, and the usual fix was to put some delay elements in the dial string, which were commas for Hayes command set modems. > and why they weren't deathstars They sure did earn that name! I was so hesitant to switch to HGST for ZFS pools due to my 90s/2000s deathstar experiences. Wouldn't run them in production for a while, of course now that I'm over it and trust them as well as any other enterprise brand, they'll screw it up again!