8 ms·
> 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
by tomxor 1y ago
> 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.
- icedchai 1y agoOn 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.)
- varispeed 1y agoI 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.
- icedchai 1y agoYou 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.
- varispeed 1y agoMakes sense. Just like today my phone shows 5G and full bars, but is as slow as dial up.
- icedchai 1y agoYes! 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...
- kstrauser 1y agoSame 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.
- aaronbaugher 1y agoI 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.
- jandrese 1y agoIIRC 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.
- madaxe_again 1y agoWinmodems. Bane of the Linux user’s existence at the time.
- timbit42 1y agoA 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!
- spauldo 1y agoYep. 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.
- timbit42 1y agoA 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.
- belthesar 1y agoWith 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.
- icedchai 1y agoI 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.
- slow_typist 1y agoTrue, 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.
- chasd00 1y agomy 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
- freedomben 1y agoHeh, 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-)
- aidenn0 1y agoMy 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.
- madaxe_again 1y agoWe 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.
- pixelpoet 1y agoI 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...
- neuralRiot 1y agoI 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.
- rossant 1y agoI 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.
- madaxe_again 1y agoYeah well I got a hernia installing office ‘97 oh no read error on disc 37 of 44.
- Hikikomori 1y agoWaited several days to download a half life patch so I could play CS that I got on a cd.
- Delk 1y agoI 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.)
- skerit 1y agoI 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.
- o11c 1y agoIt was very common to be limited to a significantly lower speed. Wikipedia sucks, so I dug up the actual v.34 standard: 33.6 kbit/s (a later addition) 31.2 kbit/s (a later addition) 28.8 kbit/s (the theoretical maximum for most people; I remember being jealous of people who actually got it) 26.4 kbit/s (what my internet usually hit in practice) 24.0 kbit/s (I remember seeing this) 21.6 kbit/s (apparently this was very common, though I don't remember seeing it) 19.2 kbit/s 16.8 kbit/s 14.4 kbit/s (quite possible) (lower bitrates are also documented; this is all multiples of 2.4 kbit/s) Also, remember to assume about 10 bits per byte of actual data, since there is various protocol overhead.
- sandworm101 1y agoIirc, most copper lines had a 50kb cap, making 56kb modems liars.
- mcny 1y agoI 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).
- throwaway984393 1y agoIIRC 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
- hadlock 1y ago> 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
- o11c 1y agoIt'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.
- Hobadee 1y agoAlso, 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.