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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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