🚀 go-pugleaf

Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:
> Cydrome Leader <presence@MUNGEpanix.com> wrote:
>>Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:
> 
>>>I wonder. Looking it up, DOCSIS 1.0 is from March, 1997. I have no idea
>>>what the state of cable broadband was prior to adoption of DOCSIS.
> 
>>I think it was just proprietary stuff prior to whatever revision to docsis 
>>was where it actually worked. 21st century had some sort of either zenith 
>>or nortel stuff, and prime had this bogus downstream only system where you 
>>needed an dialup account for upstream traffic. It was like an old data 
>>over satellite system.
> 
> That's very interesting.
> 
> So why have satellite speeds never improved? When I moved in here, AT&T
> was reselling data via satellite, which made me want to dig out an
> old modem given the cost and speeds.
> 
>>It was the late-ish 90s when I setup 56k dialup stuff at work with ISDN 
>>lines then eventually got ISDN at home and made the leap to 128k, which 
>>was a really big deal somehow. I used ISDN until maybe 5 years ago. There 
>>was some incident where I ended up dialing out thousands of times in a 
>>month when the RCN stopped unoficially supporting 2 B channel dialup into 
>>the analog dialup pools with one account.
> 
> Even Randy Suess never had ISDN. I don't understand how ISDN simply
> went through the modem pool. I thought you had your own circuit when
> there was ISDN on both ends.

Most places that offered ISDN or 56k stuff had the T1s on their side, but 
a junior operation could do the same thing with individual ISDN lines. 
There was a mix of USR and Ascend stuff at the tiny ISP for us to use. At 
a real ISP they had T1s and then DS3s fanned out into T1s with 
multiplexers. No matter what you did, the amount of wiring was 
astronomical. Big dialup pools were really expensive up front, so just 
having a rack of modems and individual phone lines was pretty common, even 
if you crossed the point of it costing more than doing it the "right" way. 
Even then a Portmaster or USR total control rack that did support the v.90 
or whatever people wanted for 56k speeds wasn't sold at 7 cents/ pound 
like they are on ebay these days.

This is why the bigger providers got bigger and everybody else just gave 
up. Spending $250k for an Ascend TNT Max so you can "compete" over dialup 
accounts for $15/month just wasn't possible for the small providers.