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Comment by ljf | Hacker News Reader

I remember my brothers friend in rural Portugal having one way satellite Internet back in the 90s to very early 00s - you used a standard dial up for the upstream, but with a satellite dish got much much faster downloads. Blew my mind that you could go out one way and receive another and still get a functioning (and fast) connection.

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Hey, in early 00 I briefly worked for an ISP trying to do rural Portugal/Spain satellite internet (to exploit rather large subsidies offered at the time)! Afair it was 1-2 Mbit downstream for all subscribers in one area from geo stationary sat with 500-1000ms pings. Almost unusable for normal browsing. Company was from defense background and from my limited understanding at the time they were piggybacking on some military leftovers tech. Idea was to use commercial Wifi to link local customers to central location with some magic proxy server trying to hide all that latency.

The first cable Internet service I had was telephone return. Downstream was over the cable modem at ~512Kbps (IIRC) but upstream was over a dial-up modem.

It was cool having a fast downstream but the slow upstream over finicky dial-up was a pain in the ass. If the dial-up dropped the in progress downloads all died because no ACKs could be sent. Gaming was no better than plain dial-up since your upstream had the same shitty latency as plain dial-up.

I remember reading about this back in the day. I seem to recall the latency being a killer.

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