🚀 go-pugleaf

Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

> The 56k was limited to 53k by FCC for a technical reason I never understood.
> It was never anywhere close to that speed due to usual crap telephone lines,
> and that not every switch was appropriate to the digital link that speed
> required.

I don't know if this applies as the reason but that whole v.90/92 standard
for 56k was based on a pipe dream.

Generally the phone company only guaranteed the bandwidth of a normal analog
line as 300Hz to 3000Hz, the 56k crap used tone sets (like 280Hz and 3150Hz)
outside of that range. I'd guess it was some kind of "look the other way"
kind of thing. They usually stuck with the same bullshit they still use
today, "speeds up to 56K".

I'd guess the feds set the limit to what was actually available rather than
the modem companies using the "finger crossed" support of 56k.

There was another problem that cropped up when dialup started to fade, some
of the suburbs around here started to get some kind of digital sharing of
their phone lines. Guess it was a capacity issue, not enough copper.

Happend to my accountant in Glenview, ordered a fax line and ended up
getting some small terminal installed, one line (the old one) going to it,
two lines out into the house. Two phone numbers.

After that, he was limited to the old 33.6k no matter what he tried.

Sort of glad that whole modem dialup is nearly dead and buried, that fucking
v90 shit was the worst. That fucking re-training when there was a burst of
line noise, thing would lock up with the ARQ light blinking on and off for
sometimes up to 2 minutes, if the connection didn't drop.

That next phase for v92 looked like another nightmare with the modem-on-hold
shit. Supposedly a user could be connected to the host, another call comes
in on their line, they could suspend the connection, take the call, then
connect back to the host without having to dial back in. Ha.

Trivia fact:

The time needed to open a 1 meg (yes just 1,000,000 bytes) mailbox on a
33.6k modem dialup.... 5 minutes.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com