Comment by jonathanlydall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonathanlydall | Hacker News Reader

I had ISDN in South Africa for a while back in the day.

Aside from the higher throughput, one of the other great things about it compared to analogue dial-up modems was the almost instant connection speed while old analogue took tens of seconds, maybe even a minute.

But the biggest thing that really made it feel “responsive” was its digital nature, meaning that your baseline latency was mere sub-10 milliseconds instead of 150ms for analogue.

Generally our monopoly telco was despised, but they had a great offer called “R7 weekend” where from 7PM Friday to 7AM Monday, no matter how long the (domestic, possibly local, only of course) call you would never be charged more than R7 for it. This meant that you could be connected for the whole weekend at 128kbps for R14 (~1.4 USD) at the time (2003-ish).

Yep, that latency thing was a huge deal to Quake(World) players back in the day. ISDN really did give a big (some would say unfair) advantage over "dialup lamers", and gaming was probably one of the main reasons for investing (or maybe more commonly, begging your parents to invest) in ISDN.

Another advantage I don’t think the article mentioned was, of course, the ability for others in the household to use the regular phone while you were online, removing a common source of intra-family conflicts. In the end, though, consumer ISDN remained a transitionary technology and most people skipped straight to DSL or cable.

Darn those Low Ping Bastards (which we all aspired to be).

We used to play Quakeworld and later Team Fortress after hours at our office. A networking consultancy. Where we went through dedicated T1s, multimegabit SMDS on to metro ethernet. We were the LPBs and got accused of cheating constantly, which was kinda true.

Amazing.

Do you know if Telkom offered ISDN around ‘95 thru to ‘01?

My parents had “two lines” back then so we could always have access to the Internet, even while talking on the phone. I recall, vaguely, using dial up but we may have had an ISDN line. In part, because my Dad wanted to order LaserDiscs from the US while my Mom was chatting away to family.

Honestly wouldn’t know, I matriculated in 2000 and didn’t actually know much about these things while in school.

Seems possible, but a second regular phone line seems just as possible.

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