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Comment by netman21 | Hacker News Reader

I launched RustNet in 1992 as "the first ISDN ISP in Michigan." We offered a blindingly fast internet speed of 125k! At the time Silicon Graphics had added an ISDN port to its latest workstation, which I had for the engineering design work we did. The launch of our ISP occurred at an industrial expo at Cobo Hall in Detroit. We were not set up yet so I talked to the product manager of the ISDN feature at SGI and he was kind enough to let me dial into his desktop workstation in his office. All I needed was to get Ameritech to drop an ISDN line into Cobo Hall. One trick we learned: if a regular dial-up customer complained about speeds we would call Ameritech to schedule that customer for ISDN. The phone company would remove something from the line (filter? impedance?) to prepare it for ISDN. Then we would cancel the order and the customer would get the full 56k from their modem.

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Ahh, good ol’ pair gain, where the ILEC would basically share one circuit between 2 houses. Saves money from not having to run a second circuit, plus the sound quality isn’t too awful as long as you’re deaf.

I also worked at an ISP. Customers would sometimes call to complain about how much we must suck because their shiny new 56k modem wouldn’t train up past 28.8, and it couldn’t possibly be on their end because they lived in a neighborhood of brand new McMansions. That’s when we had the diplomatic mission of explaining how Ma Bell saved a whole lot of money at the expense of the customer’s phone quality.

As long as we’re swapping horror stories, I can summarize another one in 1 word:

Winmodem.

shudder

We're going to need a PTSD trigger warning on this thread if we keep this up.

Did residential dial up support from 95-00, and got to experience all those disasters.

Another fun one is when you serve at the edge of two different phone companies and they didn't have enough cross connect service between the two for all the long running dial up connections. Yea, your modem banks aren't full, but your customers are getting busy signals.

That still happens on the internet, just in a different layer - between Autonomous Systems: You’re a content provider serving at the edge of two different providers and they didn’t have enough cross connect between the two for all the required bandwidth. Yea, your connection and servers are underutilized, but customers are getting timeouts.

Oh lawdy. I can't say that surprises me.

> Winmodem.

Memories! An old job bulk-bought a ton of cheap "home" PCs (Compaq Presario) to use as Citrix desktop clients; the included modem was a winmodem. We discovered the CPU in the PCs couldn't reliably run the Citrix software and maintain a modem connection at the same time. We ended up having to buy external modems (and later network cards) for all the presarios.

Thankfully we learned from the experience and stuck purchasing from the "business" product lines after that.

Ouch, LOL! There were so many tech support calls about such things. "I paid a good $30 for this new 56k modem, and I still can't download more than 2KBps when the screen saver kicks in. You guys suck!" "Did you get that from the shelf next to the $200 USR modems?" "I did. Those are rip-offs!" "Mmm-hmm."

Is this really why I could never go past 28.8k? I was 16 at that time, always wondered why - and experienced this in a few different homes until we switched to DSL.

It's very possible, especially if you lived in even a slightly rural-ish setting, like outside the city proper. There are so many reasons that could cause it, though. If you could hear any crackle or hissing during voice phone calls, that would be enough line noise to force a lower speed train-up.

I see your Winmodem and raise you one Mwave.

Oh first ISPs are fun.

I worked for the first commercial ISP in Hungary in 1995. At the time phone lines were still a hot commodity -- it takes a bit of time to fix decades of neglect, after all (Hungary was a Soviet satellite until 1989 and the wait time for a landline was ~ten years in the 80s). So supply side for lines was low and prices were high. On the other hand, the potential income for the ISP was limited because, well, it's 1995, not many people or businesses even know what Internet is good for. So how on earth did they afford the necessary many lines?

Well, see, they didn't. The guys running the place got wind of a CO in an older district in Budapest has excess capacity so they rented a flat next to the CO and drilled the wall. Presto! Plenty phone lines without installation costs.

I had ISDN in Southeast Michigan (bit north of Mt. Clemens) back in the late 90s and it was amazing. Being local, your stoy really caught my ear. I wonder about that timing, though, because 56K modems weren't available in '92. They didn't get to be a thing that people could buy until '97 or so, IIRC.

(I worked retail computer support at the time, and USRobotics did a neat sales presentation at Henry Ford Manor where, if we went to an "educational" session about the technology, we got a free modem. I already had ISDN by that time so I didn't really need it, but it was still neat. And a couple-hundred-dollar modem, for free, for a retail employee seemed like quite a perk.)

Prepping a pair for ISDN could involve removing load coils (very common in more rural areas) or “designing” the pair by removing bridged taps. Both of these actions improved the quality of the facility. Also, if the facility ran through a pair gain system (or subscriber loop carrier) a reprovisioning onto a different card could be massively beneficial. I have fond recollections of the areas in rural Maine where the SLC mode kept my customers well below the maximum theoretical capability of their 56K modems, causing the normal complaints. Dialup was fun!

Another trick was to ask the ILEC for an alarm circuit between two premises, giving you a dedicated circuit via dry copper pairs between them.

I had one of those between my home and my office. It worked great for about 6 months until it stopped working entirely. No support was available because the only supported signaling was the closing of a relay. The phone company seemed to be searching out likely alarm circuit data use and putting filters on them to force an upgrade to a data circuit. (USWest/QWest)

Didn't see the same with SBC/ATT [1] in the Chicago burbs mid 90s fortunately. Even got a tour of the central office by walking up to the door as an early teen and asking to look around. Different times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_AT%26T#Rise_of_SBC

I remember those days! I know a couple guys that got DSL over those alarm pairs.

There were a couple of us around here who had the alarm circuit hack for DSL until Bellsouth finally figured out how to make it impossible to order. It was never easy, but (I assume) neglect of the systems, changes in tariffing and oversight, and BS not wanting to sell it finally let them get away with not provisioning the service without explicitly saying 'no'.

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