11–20 of 143 posts
That reminds me of my short time with ISDN and the amazing availability to receive calls on the second line without forcing me offline.
That 128Kbps on ISDN was the like the gold standard back then! I knew some sysadmins who had that installed to their homes so they could be available at any time. All paid for by the company they worked for.
That reminds me of my short time with ISDN and the amazing availability to receive calls on the second line without forcing me offline.
That 128Kbps on ISDN was the like the gold standard back then! I knew some sysadmins who had that installed to their homes so they could be available at any time. All paid for by the company they worked for.
Fast-forward to 2025, and I now have dual 1Gbps symmetric fiber connections (AT&T, GFiber) into my home from opposite sides of the house. (It's totally gratuitous and I'll probably cancel GFiber in a few months, but I wanted to have it wired up so I could more quickly start service in the future.)
ah, good ol' capping out at 26.4kb/s...until 2005
Around 2000, I saw a crew pulling new phone lines through the neighborhood because everybody was getting a second line and they were running out, but even after switching to the new copper, we were still stuck at 26400. 20+ years later, it looks like 25/5 ADSL is now available at that address, so the new copper wasn't a complete waste.
Yes these modems were almost-ISDN (minus the razor fast call setup). And required a full digital backend to work. They could only do 56k6 in one direction, to the user too. But they were made for internet access so that didn't really matter.
That reminds me of my short time with ISDN and the amazing availability to receive calls on the second line without forcing me offline.
That 128Kbps on ISDN was the like the gold standard back then! I knew some sysadmins who had that installed to their homes so they could be available at any time. All paid for by the company they worked for.
One of my internships in college was at Sun Microsystems in the org that provided this connectivity to employees. My job was to automate pushing updates to connection software and modem firmware down to clients, but I ended up doing a lot of technical support as well.
That reminds me of my short time with ISDN and the amazing availability to receive calls on the second line without forcing me offline.
I'm still mad that they high-quality voice audio possible through ISDN didn't become ubiquitous. It's ridiculous to hear the clipped frequency range of a plain old telephone line during radio interviews in 2025.
I know Southwest Bell bought a number of them and stuffed them in a closet north of downtown Dallas. During the install I remember having to explain what Ethernet was to their techs. They were EXCELLENT at phone standards, but had decided the data world was threatening and were determined to never learn anything about it.
I know that between around '93 and '97 if you dialed AOL from D/FW there was a good chance your call would be terminated somewhere within a mile or two of your house and the bits flowing between your Compaq Presario and AOL would be sent digitally from the local CO to AOL's data center in Sterling, VA.
This line of business was (of course) destroyed by consumer DSL and cable modems, but for about 5 years it was fairly popular with the phone companies. ISDN at the time was a bit pricey for most households and a modem is a one-off purchase. Most people I knew using things like AOL or CompuServe were using a hand-me-down 36k modem on a crappy 33MHz 486sx running DOS / Win3.1 / Win95 and were fairly cost-sensitive.
That reminds me of my short time with ISDN and the amazing availability to receive calls on the second line without forcing me offline.
I'm still mad that they high-quality voice audio possible through ISDN didn't become ubiquitous. It's ridiculous to hear the clipped frequency range of a plain old telephone line during radio interviews in 2025.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still mad that they high-quality voice audio possible through ISDN didn't become ubiquitous. It's ridiculous to hear the clipped frequency range of a plain old telephone line during radio interviews in 2025.
24 [bit] * 192 [kHz] = 4.608 [Mbps]. Maybe not sensible to do so, but many people could have Discord calls in uncompressed "high-res" WAV. It's crazy that there aren't even 16bit/44.1k modes in most voice call apps.
That reminds me of my short time with ISDN and the amazing availability to receive calls on the second line without forcing me offline.
I'm still mad that they high-quality voice audio possible through ISDN didn't become ubiquitous. It's ridiculous to hear the clipped frequency range of a plain old telephone line during radio interviews in 2025.