Wow, thanks for sharing your Internet, though I should say 'telephone communications' history. Thanks for the history link too kitz!
I will share my history too.
I'm not 100% sure of this part. But I'm sure I first started using a modem while I still had my Amiga. I would dial in to Amiga BBS's for game files, and of course I played some door and mud games on them. I liked the challenge of trying to get in to the sysop's secret file area that usually you had to be a trusted friend or have uploaded some files of a similar kind to what he had.
I think back then I was using very low speed modems. 9600bps and below. So transfering files took a while, though back then the file sizes were very small.
After running up some big phone bills with that, I eventually found a more social BBS called The Forest BBS that was based in milton keynes by a guy who was a bit of a whizz. He eventually owned about 28 phone lines at one point. People could type chat in the teleconference room (similar to irc), play trivia, and door games. There was also a module that allowed multiplayer games to be played on there. Games like Doom and Doom 2 were big back then, and regularly the BBS would hold tournaments of its players.
Eventually I crossed over to the PC and I was with Freeserve as my first main ISP. I remember that Freeserve CD's were everywhere at the time. I also bought better modem's, eventually settling on the 56k modem. I was now able to play those door games on the BBS, and also now connect to the Internet.
I still remember using usenet to download a 70mb file and it nearly taking all day lol.
I left Freeserve just as Wanadoo took it over. I moved to Pipex. I had a good time at Pipex. I think my speeds were still low at this point. I think about 2Mb's. It was at this time I think the ADSL Max came out and offered up to 8Mb's. Though as pointed out earlier in this thread some people were actually ending up worse off. So my 2Mb's was solid and though it was a lower speed I liked the consistancy.
For some reason towards the end of my time with Pipex the service became worse and worse. If I was uploading something suddenly I couldnt load up webpages. It's like my connection was flooded. This got worse and worse, so I eventually left them.
I moved to Be and on to their ADSL2+ technology. I think I got 12Mb's from them. I can't actually remember ever losing sync. I used the Netgear DG834GT with a modified firmware. I never used the Be modem/router.
Then Sky bought Be out. My phone stopped working and my net speed dropped by half. After arguing with them (and later finding out someone had pulled the phone line out of the socket at the exchange) I left.
I moved to BT Infinity. That's where I currently am. I had the HH5, which eventually broke. Then now I'm using HG612 with the Asus RT-N66U router.
