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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

On top of that, almost nobody actually connected at 56K. You needed a perfect phone line. Still, compression did help a bit. Dialup latency sucked though. It was 100's of milliseconds.

I had a friend with a 56K ISDN line (data over voice channel) and it was much better performance (10's of milliseconds.)

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With my v.92 soft modem, I was able to regularly connect at 48k, and sometimes 53.3k. I never connected at theoretical max of 56k.

Worthwhile to also mention that ISDN was full duplex, instead of half-duplex like dialup. The modems on either end would need to time-slice to allow bi-directional communication, which in a TCP laden world like the web meant that every interaction was orders of magnitude more latent than on ISDN, in which you had symmetrical, full-duplex 56k of bandwidth between you and the ISDN modem. That's the biggest reason why you had a significant decrease in latency.

I also vaguely remember there being FCC power limitations on (some?) 56K modems, limiting them to ~53K max. Also, even with a 56K connection, upload speeds were still limited to 33.6K max.

Fortunately, I got cable internet around 1997 and never looked back.

I remember connecting at 56K. I couldn't afford real 56K modem, but there were cheaper ones that offloaded communication to the CPU. When parents weren't home I was rewiring the socket to connect my modem. So not ideal, but worked. Explaining high bills was fun.

You may have connected at 56K, but it was rare to see in practice. I worked for an ISP and we could see all the stats. We had Ascend Max equipment. To add further confusion, your modem may have been reporting the serial port rate, not the actual line rate.

Makes sense. Just like today my phone shows 5G and full bars, but is as slow as dial up.

Yes! Also, early ISPs were often massively over subscribed. They might have fractional T1 line coming into a POP (example: 384Kbit line) with 100 modems off of it. At peak times, you not only got busy signals, but when you did get through, a slow connection because that upstream pipe was full...

Same here. I lived in the middle of nowhere but somehow surprisingly close to a remote CO, and I could regularly get 44Kbps connections. My friends were envious.

My "favorite" thing when working tech support was explaining to people in expensive new subdivisions that Southwest Bell saved money by deploying pair gains instead of running more copper, and that's why they were never, ever going to see more than 33.6 (if very lucky) or 28.8 (more likely).

A common trick was to get them to add 3 commas to their dial string. That would prevent their modem from starting to train up until 3 seconds after they finished dialing. That would give our modems time to answer and start the 56K initiation. The delay would cause them to miss that, and then start trying to train up a much more stable 33.6 connection. It capped their max speed but made their connection a lot more reliable.

I lived in the country with pretty poor phone lines, so I'd send my 56k modem a command to limit it to 19.2. If it tried to train up to 28.8, there would be so many bad blocks it'd grind to a stop with all the retransmits until it dropped back to 19.2 anyway, so locking it there worked best.

IIRC connecting to the PSTN the best you would ever see was 48kbps, at least in the states, although if you were transferring uncompressed data in the clear sometimes the modem could compress it for you on the fly to get more data on the wire. In practice though big files tended to be compressed already so you rarely saw much benefit from that. You needed some sort of closed phone network that didn't compress the voice channel the way the phone company did in order for the modems to negotiate up to the max.

Winmodems. Bane of the Linux user’s existence at the time.

A decade after they went off the market I came across one still in the shrink wrap and gag gifted it to a couple of friends. Neither one wanted it for some reason. "Oh, gee, thanks". LOL!

Yep. And nothing on the packaging to tell you this.

Later on, there were modems that required a CPU with MMX instructions. Dealt with that a lot when I ran my short-lived computer shop.

I made it a policy in '97 to only buy external modems.

A friend of mine replaced the twisted pair from where it entered his house, to his modem with a piece of coax. He claimed it helped.

True, latency was much better via ISDN. Also we had channel bundling in Germany: 2 x 64 kbit/s. Shared via 10 Mbit/s LAN of course. The hub was a 19 inch beast with fans. Absolutely worked.

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