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I went to college in 1997 and went from 28.8kbps dialup to a 2.4gbit OC-48. I had no idea how slow the rest of the internet was until I had a better connection than most servers (at the time).
Edit: I was connected to the dorm ethernet via 10mbit NICs. So even with 5 PCs running in my dorm room, we were only using a fraction of the available bandwidth.
Your dorm must have had epic lan parties.
I worked for the department that ran student computer labs (before most people started bringing computers to college with them). That's where the real epic lan parties happened. Every time we'd update the desktops we'd celebrate with an all-nighter lan party for staff and friends.
I went to a small charter high school around 2002-3 and their whole education curriculum was on computers. The school principal would do monthly lan parties, then wipe the floor with us teenagers on age of empires 2. I still fear elephant charges.
My exact timeline.
Hello fellow 45 year old.
Hey! How are your knees?
Stopped selling it in about 2001? Stopped using it in 1999. I was fortunate enough to have been part of an ISP startup when T1 was coming in, and my apartment was serviced by me.
Fun times, I ran a BBS and traveled around my town to the 3 ISPs that had started or were starting (all tiny) asking for a job. One of them was 2 guys who were setting up 300 external modems in a York Properties building basement. I got to be employee #3 on site, learned so much there since it was ground up.
I got ISDN from work in 1995. MSN was my ISP for some reason. It was glorious! In FPS shooters I had a 30 ping while everyone else had 200. I was a beast !
2002~2003 We got a glorious "high speed cable internet" of 1mb when we were kids. My mom got pissed off that we were waking up at 4 am to play Tibia on school days and hired it. In my country, dial-up was free before 6 am and past midnight, and after 2 pm past saturday, so we had to play while it was free. She got really mad at us, but instead of taking the pc away, she realized that the game was helping us learn English and decided to hire cable internet. I bet my home was one of the first ones in my city to have """good""" internet back then. None of my peers at school had it until a couple of years later.
- Went from 56K to 3Mbps cable. It was mind-blowingly fast at the time.
But then in 2004 my parents had to go back to dialup for awhile to save money, which was brutal. Especially since I would video chat with my GF often and download all sorts of stuff from KaZaA. Have you ever tried to do a video call on dialup? 0.1-0.5 FPS and compressed so badly that it's hard to make out even basic facial features. It's a miracle that it worked at all.
I lucky enough to get my first DSL line in 1997.
Was only paying for 128Kbps down but this was before they actually had any throttling in place, and I was close enough to the DLAM to get 1Mbit down. It was mind-blowing at a time when a 1.44Mbps T1 line was $1000+/month pipe dream!
August 2001, I moved from Berks County PA, where I was a hundred feet or so too far from getting DSL, to central Maryland where there was Comcast cable already in my apartment.
When I went to university in 2003. The telephone exchange in the village my parents lived in finally got upgraded to ADSL in 2004 or 2005 I think after a grassroots ISP collected enough subscribers to pay for it (after which the national telco was happy to start offering service, screwing over the grassroots ISP)
University internet was 10 Mbps, but the year after they kicked the dorms off the school network and put us on the consumer city fiber network which was 100 Mbps. About a decade later I moved in somewhere with 1 Gbps.
And I now have 10 Gbps at home. How times have changed...
I think it was 2007, the family upgraded to a 3G modem when Telstra got around to putting up a tower that provided mobile reception where we were living. I was pretty happy as with the quality of rural phone lines we weren't even getting the full potential of dial up (maxxed out at 30 ish kB/s).
Of course the next problem was trying to keep under the tiny download caps of the time, I remember having to wait until the end of the month (when usage was about to reset) to download large files or risk having my parents and siblings annoyed at me for using up all the quota...
I'd say 1999, first DSL was only 1.1M
Got DSL in like 2003? I remember some friends with 128 ISDN back in like 1998, that was mind blowing to me, not having to dial in.
I think 2008 or so.
2000, when the dial up service I was using announced they were shutting down.
Somewhere in the mid 1990s, my company provided ISDN so I could work from home
Oooh yeah, ISDN. My cable solution that I got in year 2000 (to answer OP's question) didn't work very well, and DSL wasn't an option yet I think.
For those ready to listen to my nostalgia:
ISDN was awesome because even the smallest solution had two channels. So two phonecalls on one line. Great for businesses. Also, a channel had 64 kbit, slightly faster than the analog modems which I think maxed out at 54 kbit, which was often unlikely to be reached.
But the trick is, the two channels could be combined to 128 kbit. An incoming or outgoing phonecall would simply reduce the speed back to 64, instead of interrupting the connection.
Although I paid by the minute, and using two channels doubled the cost, so I usually only used it when I was literally waiting for a data transfer and would be paying the same price anyway.
Actually, I think my ISDN would count as dial-up, as I paid by the minute.
I don’t know how much it costs. I remember being shocked at the price but the company was willing to pay, so great. At the time, there weren’t too many people able to work from home
The price wasn't too bad for me. I didn't have a very high income, but I paid for my ISDN myself.
But I do remember the improvement after switching to DSL, even if this was the early days of DSL that didn't work thaaat great, it was still way better than analog modem or ISDN.
Stop?
screeching telephone noises
I just flirted with your modem.
I hope you use Zmodem so we can pick up where we left off if we lose our connection.
ATDT
I think our household was the first in my primary school class to get broadband, which I think was the late 90s. It was still measured in kbps (like 250-500 or so?), but it didn’t cost more to be online permanently. (ADSL).