Comment by o11c
1 day ago
It was very common to be limited to a significantly lower speed. Wikipedia sucks, so I dug up the actual v.34 standard:
33.6 kbit/s (a later addition)
31.2 kbit/s (a later addition)
28.8 kbit/s (the theoretical maximum for most people; I remember being jealous of people who actually got it)
26.4 kbit/s (what my internet usually hit in practice)
24.0 kbit/s (I remember seeing this)
21.6 kbit/s (apparently this was very common, though I don't remember seeing it)
19.2 kbit/s
16.8 kbit/s
14.4 kbit/s (quite possible)
(lower bitrates are also documented; this is all multiples of 2.4 kbit/s)
Also, remember to assume about 10 bits per byte of actual data, since there is various protocol overhead.
That's how I remember it.
For completeness, 33.6 required insane levels of signal clarity on the phone line, and was mostly fiction outside of urban and dense suburban areas.
Prior to 14.4k, there were other generations of modems that came before: 9600, 2400, and even 300 baud modems were all you could get in their respective eras. Each of which were cutting edge at the time.
56K (also called V.90 or "V.everything"), leaned into the quantization that happens on digital phone trunks, rather than let the analog-to-digital conversion chew up your analog modem waveforms. The trick here is that the psuedo-digital-over-analog leg from your house to the local exchange was limited by a few miles. Try this from too far out of town, and it just doesn't work. And to be clear, this was prior to DSL, which is similar but a completely different beast.
Oh, and the V.90 spec was a compromise between two competing 56K standards at the time: K56Flex and X2. This meant that ISPs needed to have matching modems on their end to handle the special 56K signaling. Miraculously, the hardware vendors did something that was good for everyone and compromised on a single standard, and then pushed firmware patches that allowed the two brands to interoperate on existing hardware.
Also, line conditions were subject to a range of factors. It's all copper wire hung from power-poles after all. So, poor quality materials, sloppy workmanship, and aging infrastructure would introduce noise all by itself, and even during weather events. This meant that, for some, it was either a good day or a bad day to try to dial into the internet.
My first modem was 1200... In the early 90's, I got a 9600 baud modem, which is where it felt like things were really taking off. A whole page of text in less than a couple of seconds! I ran my own BBS on 9600 for years.
Going from a 1200 to a 9600 blew my mind- text faster than I could ever hope to read! The future had arrived.
1 reply →
No Courier, no carrier.
Don't forget the first mass produced consumer modems were 300 baud, and yes we're ignoring the model 37 teletype at 120 baud. Then 1200 baud came soon after for a huge improvement.
Of course we're talking terminal, BBS, and Compuserve users here. AOL was probably grief at those speeds.
Modems stopped improving after 56k. I was always excited by the ability to pause the internet while another call came through but like all good things it came too late. And by that time I moved up (and likely was the last to move up).
> 28.8 kbit/s (the theoretical maximum)
"56k" modems hit the scene (at affordable prices) in ~1998 and 3.2-4.1KB/s were pretty normal. People in high school who "only" had a 28.8 modem were considered dinosaurs by then. We didn't get DSL until ~mid 2000 IIRC
It's not a matter of what the modems were capable of, it's a matter of what the phone line would and could actually carry. Maybe it would be different in a big city, but I don't think I ever saw anybody get over 33.6 before upgrading to DSL.
I lived in a city but I got a connection at ~48k on a V.90 regularly.
It did depend on line quality, though. We had some kinds of splitters and internal cabling in the house for allowing multiple phones (and eventually the modem), and I remember that prior to some changes made to that, I only used to get up to ~40k.
33.6 was the highest V.90 specified for output over an analog connection. ISPs would have a digital connection the phone company and the signal (ideally) would stay digital until it was turned analog to send over your local loop. This is why it was 33.6kbps up and 56kbps down. I believe the regulatory limit was 53kbps in the US, and it was not uncommon for my modem to negotiate something in the 40s, as we had a somewhat long local loop (hence my RBOC denying us DSL; we had a local loop that was 2 "kilofeet" too long).
I was born in 1996, this is like a bedtime story to me. I had AOL as a kid because my family was poor, but I do not remember any of the numbers. Please post more cool stuff like this.
Iirc, most copper lines had a 50kb cap, making 56kb modems liars.
I can't prove this but I somehow remember peaks of up to 48 kilobits per second though never sustained.
I remember being amazed to see download resume right in the browser even as late as 2009 (I was only on dial up u til about 2006).
IIRC limit isn't the copper, it's the CO interconnects with high/low frequency cutoffs, the same copper was used for 1.5Mbps synchronous DSL. For very short runs, 50Mbps VDSL
I remember being SOOOO jealous of my buddy, cause their family got a 28.8 modem! (We were stuck on 16k at the time, IIRC)