Back in the day, there was occasional talk/accounts of "shotgunning" two modems on two separate landlines. Now we know it would work on a dozen, well done.
That would have been pretty good back in the day. I don't recall when the BoStream people started to first appear but they started to push 1mbit/s or more and the 56k modems felt very slow in comparison.
I don't miss tweaking all the counter strike settings to try and optimise for the latency to the servers I played on and the limitations of bandwidth nor loosing the only phone. Everything was so much slower.
I feel like I remember seeing a 112k modem with 2 phone lines in a magazine once. Yep. It was made by Diamond, who also made some early graphics cards.
I maintained some backend Linux dialup PPP infrastructure at a company called ConnectSoft back in the late 90s who sold clip-art and fonts "online" via dialup, as well as selling a reasonably popular Windows Email client. I had a number of phone lines at home, and would occasionally use the Linux EQL[0] driver to bind together up to 4 PPP sessions using 56kb modems. There is nothing you can do about lousy modem latency, but the bandwidth felt very luxurious and futuristic at the time.
I used to work at a DoorDash-type company in the early 2000s. Back then, we passed the orders onto the restaurant by faxing them. We had a machine with I believe 16 modems (might have been 20?) attached to do the faxing. I would have loved to try something like this with that setup.
> Multilink PPP technology was one possible solution to faster internet connectivity before ISDN and ADSL connectivity became widespread
Oddly enough, mlppp was used in my area to bond multiple adsl1 lines together. Too bad most of that history died with the shutdown of dslreports/broadbandreports.com
Neat. I remember when the X2, 56K, and V.92 came out and made previously painfully-slow 28.8K modem speeds less terrible by comparison, which itself a nearly performance doubling of 14.4K modems.
A reminder that first bit/byte/packet/etc. latency can never be reduced by adding more channels.
Dear lord my region was blessed with cable internet in 1995. Wasn't fast but it was really affordable and the latency was better than dial up. Though once it got crowded during peak hours it crumbled to a halt.
In 1998, my hometown (>100K population) had an uplink of 2 bonded USR modems over a pair of dedicated phone lines to the regional capital about 100km away. This uplink fed two ISPs with 5 and 4 dial-up phone lines. The smaller one bought a DirecPC card to feed its dial-up clients and advertised it as "high-speed internet access".
15 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] threadOf course 12 physical phone lines to a residence would be eye wateringly expensive…
I don't miss tweaking all the counter strike settings to try and optimise for the latency to the servers I played on and the limitations of bandwidth nor loosing the only phone. Everything was so much slower.
[0]: https://youtu.be/LZ259Jx8MQY?si=w4ttuV-kqoRQykmI
[1]: https://youtube.com/@theparallelport?si=Go4gTh6JKVypCx84
They have a ton of documentaries about the early internet, including interviews with people part of a particular scene at that time.
[0]: https://docs.kernel.org/networking/eql.html
Oddly enough, mlppp was used in my area to bond multiple adsl1 lines together. Too bad most of that history died with the shutdown of dslreports/broadbandreports.com
A reminder that first bit/byte/packet/etc. latency can never be reduced by adding more channels.