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Bonding twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records

tomshardware.com

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Re: Bonding twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records

#11

Post by II2II »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #2

They ran real dialup modems over VoIP??? Didn’t think it worked that way. Of course 12 physical phone lines to a residence would be eye wateringly expensive…

It was a fun experiment done by a couple of people who acquired the equipment from a defunct ISP (and likely elsewhere) to see what could be done with period equipment. It's not a question of would you do it, but could you do it. Even after considering the cost of phone lines, the modems they used would have cost a few thousand and the multiple multi-port serial adapters weren't cheap either (they were planning to use two 8 port cards, which had conflicting drivers).

As for doing it over VoIP, the box they used appeared to be the sort of thing installed in offices to support multiple phone lines. I wouldn't be surprised if they could bypass the VoIP functionality altogether since they were making internal calls.

Re: Bonding twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records

#12

Post by phire »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #2

They ran real dialup modems over VoIP??? Didn’t think it worked that way. Of course 12 physical phone lines to a residence would be eye wateringly expensive…

They are using VoIP hardware, but it's not actually VoIP (which would be limited to 33kbps, they are connecting at 44kbps).

The 56k modem standard actually abuses the T1 digital voice signalling that telephone exchanges were using in the 90s/2000s. It only works when the ISP modems are connected via digital T1 lines, and the telephone connection remains digital right up until your local exchange before being converted to analog.

56k modems only work if one side of the link is digital, a pure analog connection, or any digital signalling that didn't match the exact standard telecommunication companies were using back then simply wouldn't work. So they have set up their VoIP hardware to convert directly from analog telephone lines to a bundled T1 PRI connection, which is fed into the ISP's modem bank.

They go into a lot of detail on this setup in "DIAL-UP goes DIGITAL: Setting up PRI for the TOTAL CONTROL - ISP Ep 7" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ0KTtMQ_8s

The earlier episodes are good too, but that one covers getting 56k modems working.

Re: Bonding twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records

#14

Post by giantrobot »

twodave wrote: post #13

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.

That was mentioned in the article, the Shotgun. It required two phone lines and for many ISPs two accounts. For that price you could have gotten an ISDN line and has better performance even with similar bandwidth.

Re: Bonding twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records

#16

Post by Onawa »

giantrobot wrote: post #14
twodave wrote: post #13

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.

That was mentioned in the article, the Shotgun. It required two phone lines and for many ISPs two accounts. For that price you could have gotten an ISDN line and has better performance even with similar bandwidth.

Not if you grew up in the middle of nowhere like I did. I would have killed for that speed as a kid.

I was able to get 30-50 mbps when I finally got a smartphone I could tether in 2005. DSL didn't arrive where I grew up until probably 2012-2013.

Re: Bonding twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records

#17

Post by spudlyo »

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.

[0]: https://docs.kernel.org/networking/eql.html

Re: Bonding twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records

#18

Post by geerlingguy »

rus20376 wrote: post #4

I wish the article had more details on the ISP side of the connection!

The article is on Tom's Hardware. But the project is by The Serial Port on YouTube. Tons of great videos exploring networking, ISPs, and old systems on that channel.

Re: Bonding twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records

#19

Post by toast0 »

giantrobot wrote: post #14
twodave wrote: post #13

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.

That was mentioned in the article, the Shotgun. It required two phone lines and for many ISPs two accounts. For that price you could have gotten an ISDN line and has better performance even with similar bandwidth.

At least in socal Pacific Bell territory, ISDN didn't have an unlimited tariff, so you'd be paying per minute when you were online, and a lot of ISPs charged more for ISDN as well.

Re: Bonding twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records

#20

Post by vjshah »

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.
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