Kitz Forum
Chat => Chit Chat => Topic started by: Weaver on November 20, 2021, 06:02:30 PM
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b*cat posted --
A magnificent 242 kbps downstream. I now claim the title of slowest line of any kitizen! Can this be officially confirmed now please ;)
Certainly. :)
I have just had a sudden memory of using a remote full-screen editor, at 300 bps, way back in the 1980s. :D
And Weaver responded --
Mind you, while I was enjoying 0.5 / 0.5 Mbps back in 2004, some people were still on 128k ISDN. And what a horrible monthly cost that was too, iirc BT was charging £300 per quarter and I can’t remember now about any other costs. Dialup customers such as myself pre 2004 were all using the BT all-you-can-eat product ( Surftime Anytime - is that what it was ? ) at £40 pm for unlimited dialup phone call time to your ISP.
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Mind you, while I was enjoying 0.5 / 0.5 Mbps back in 2004, some people were still on 128k ISDN.
The BT Business Highway (and the BT Home Highway) provided two 64kbps B-channels and one 16kbps D-channel. It was only by establishing two connections, using both B-channels, could the heady heights of a 128kbps connection be achieved. The D-channel was used for control purposes.
I remember reading ISDN being described as a solution looking for a problem to solve. :D
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I installed ISDN NICs at two customers’ sites using Win XP Pro PCs as routers. And they fired up both their channels and gave a full 128k, much better than the 33k max dialup nominal bit rate using v90 modems. Even I got 49k/33k at home. The massive compression effectiveness of Microsoft’s MPPC (is that right) compression when connected to Demon Internet’s servers was 100% - 300% on the right data, but no good for images/sound/video the latter being invariably pre compressed anyway. But since that compression was so powerful, those old ISDN links could sometimes hugely outperform a slow ADSL link of today given favourable data.
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Adsl 1/2mbit service everything felt lightning fast, as when I got it, most of the internet was still designed for 56k modems.
Also in those days before ofcom forcefully made Openreach, I remember been able to ring up freeserve on a Sunday and exchange fault was fixed same day.
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Agreed. ADSL 0.5 / 0.5 Mbps did feel fast before YouTube Netflix etc and the demands of streaming video, and, as you point out, before Tim Berners-Lee’s creation got horribly bloated by foolish and greedy web designers. Thank god for CSS!
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I had Home Highway before ADSL arrived.
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Oh wow. Not sure if I could have got it; I did install systems for customers though.
amy dialup was superb though, 49/33 kbps even out here and with amazing compression. And my next door neighbour was a graphic designer with on of those huge Translucent and Blue fussy/fancy plastic PPC Macs running the nasty old Apple OS before OS/X came along and wash all the horridness, unspeakableness, and most of the vileness away.
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I have a vague memory that the BT Business Highway / BT Home Highway units were manufactured by ECI. Users of those services actually had a digital link on the access network pair (at 120V DC, from the exchange to power the end-user units).
Compare that with the still current xDSL technology (which displaced those "Highway" services) which operates with an analogue link on the access network pair.
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This nonsense about foolish governments definition of ‘superfast’ which isn’t even a word has no need to exist because it’s just shorthand for a completely arbitrary number, which is made up, time-varying anyway and already laughably out-of-date. It’s like defining a new ‘government word’, for us all from the ministry of newspeak, and this week’s offering is ‘supertall’ which means 2.156 m tall. There’s no need for such a thing, and I just made that particular number up. Coming back to the linguistic poverty of ‘superfast’: which direction? What moron forgot about upstream, thinking only about the domestic voters downloading from Netflix et al and forgetting all the business users? And now suddenly also the millions of home workers using FaceTime, Zoom, the NHS (web?) app, Skype et al.
It’s supposed to be 30, no 24 no 30 Mbps downstream / <don’t-know> upstream (so let’s all agree to give ourselves a break and make it a symmetric requirement then ;) ). But just now, many more clued up domestic users will be wanting 0.9 / <not-sure> Gbps or even a genuine 1 Gbps depending on what they’ve heard advertised. So already the government speak is between 30 × too slow nowadays - after all, remember this is supposed to be ‘super’ not just ‘broad’, no? Something really special - FTTC users in fact moan about 30Mbps - over ten times faster than one of my ADSL2 lines? Do we need another useless term like ‘ultra’ now? - for the ‘requirement’ for either crap upstream or symmetric ~1Gbps.
Way back when, we jumped from 50 k / 33 kbps dialup with V.90, possibly with very very good textual data compression on top, to 0.5 / 0.5 Mbps, so what roughly 10 × in the most favourable case, for downstream. So then after two years, I suddenly got a × 3.5 downstream speed jump overnight when BT’s new variable DLM came in. And I didn’t even know. A bit like Santa dropping in unexpectedly. What was that excellent ADSL system called ? - let’s see: https://kitz.co.uk/adsl/maxdsl.htm That was up to 7 or 8 Mbps sync rate downstream and 448k upstream or 768k [?] if you bought the BT Premium traffic option for £10, which I immediately did to get slightly better upstream as my line wasn’t good enough to see the upstream benefit.
So then we had ADSL2+, and Annex M, got us up to what 20 Mbps / upstream I forget - with or without Annex M. And then this nonsense about 30 Mbps comes round because everyone absolutely has to have 4k IPTV. And we forget all the businesses in the country as their requirements matter to no one. So in total, from dialup to the silly 30 Mbps ‘super duper fast ’ is a downstream expansion of × 600 in terms of expectations. Then there’s the amazing jump from 30 Mbps to the new step at 900 Mbps which is another × 30, so now x 18000 [!] in total. I hope got the arithmetic right.
Grrrr. I feel much better now.
Things will surely stick at 900 Mbps download speeds from while. Hopefully it will be symmetric gigabit before two long for business users without costing the earth. But since - there aren’t any applications much for > 1Gbps FTTP and
- there’s the massive problem of having to get rid of all the slower routers, the smaller problems of
- getting rid of 1Gbps switches,
- losing the gigabit ethernet over copper, and
- WLANs becoming a real pain and
- PCs own NICs, and
- internal i/o becoming inadequate,
then it’s going to be a long time before it’s even possible to deploy 10Gbps all the way from LA to your RAM or CPU. Tablets and phones and laptops will need to be swapped out and that will not be popular with the users, so another drag on progress to 10G. I am indeed sure that 1G FTTP will have a long reign. What will happen is that some people will buy into 10G without understanding that they won’t be able to realise it in a complete, bottleneck-free path.
Isn’t it incredible though that we’ll soon be expecting comms 18000 times faster than we used to happily manage with (not so good for YouTube/Netflix) in the V.90 days? Hopefully we’ll be coming out of the comms dark ages into the new happy days of fibre and serious i/o capability.
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running the nasty old Apple OS before OS/X came along and wash all the horridness, unspeakableness, and most of the vileness away.
Still feels pretty vile to me. Really silly things like how it STILL mounts everything as virtual disks, if I put my MacBook to sleep it disconnects the network shares and I have to wait for WiFi to take up and SMB broadcasts to be found to reconnect them. Its WAY slower than Windows where they are just always there mounted as drive letters.
I really need to learn if I can make shortcuts of some sort because its getting REALLY tedious having to constantly find the path I want again compared to Windows drive letter and Linux mounted folders. Anyway, I digress.
Getting back on topic, superfast is bad, fibre (that is actually copper) is bad, but its even more silly now we have FTTP being advertised as UIltrafast, because they're literally running out of ideas of how to market that its faster than what went before. They've really backed themselves into a corner to try and explain to customers why FTTP is vastly superior.
As for 10Gbit, the forums are already full of people complaining that they can't realise 1Gbit in a single download thread, and that's from limitations at the ISP and/or CDN. Plus of course the obvious case where almost everyone uses WiFi and getting consistent Gigabit over WiFi is impossible. I HAVE hit 940Mbit to my NAS once or twice, but its not at all consistent and regularly drops to more like 400Mbit.
I wouldn't discount faster than Gigabit FTTP coming sooner than you think though, I've seen a fair few posts on forums from people with 2.4Gbit FTTP (I think some parts of Europe) which is kinda bizarre as in most cases those require bonding two ethernet ports, as 2.5Gbit ethernet is only just becoming common and even then usually only on the WAN port so again, intended to provide good speeds to multiple clients at the same time, not the full speed to a single one. I have bonded my pfSense box so when I finally get FTTP I can see what happens if I balance 5G and FTTP. ;)
My first modem was 14.4K though, at that point 33.6K was already common but it was free due to being thrown out, as was my first PC actually, a 486. I can't remember if it was Demon which was the ISP I cheekily used at first, back when they charged a monthly fee AND call charges, one of the ISPs had their signup number directly connected to the Internet so I never signed up with them and just used that. ;) The phone bill was astronomical though.
The only thing I miss from back then was the sound of the (eventually) V90 modem connecting. Though file transfers to my friend in Texas over XMPP often mimicks dialup. Downloading from YouTube actually mimics single-channel ISDN lately as they seem to be trying to discourage using unofficial downloaders. (3.7% of 2.96GiB at 58.67KiB/s ETA 14:09:57)
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I have a vague memory that the BT Business Highway / BT Home Highway units were manufactured by ECI. Users of those services actually had a digital link on the access network pair (at 120V DC, from the exchange to power the end-user units).
Compare that with the still current xDSL technology (which displaced those "Highway" services) which operates with an analogue link on the access network pair.
Alas, that tends to be most of my memory these days - vague ;D
However, I seem to recall the nominal voltage was 90Vdc for the highway beasties ??. A stand alone ISDN circuit is also fed via 90Vdc.
Once you get into the 100+ voltages, you're talking DACS equipment, circa 140Vdc.
Fit a lot of these back in the day when they were first introduced, was always a good gig during inclement weather as all the work was inside at the premises and also at the Exchange (replacing the green/black PSTN coloured jumper-wire for the green/yellow digital services coloured jumper wire).
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. . . I seem to recall the nominal voltage was 90Vdc for the highway beasties ??. A stand alone ISDN circuit is also fed via 90Vdc.
Once you get into the 100+ voltages, you're talking DACS equipment, circa 140Vdc.
Ah, so it was the DACS units that were evil in terms of DC voltages. I had completely forgotten about them.
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Ah, DACS, the reason I could never get more than 33.6kbps when I was on dialup.
When I first contracted for ADSL (1Mbps!) they had to find the thing. Turned out it was buried under the pavement about 20 yards outside my house. No access box or anything, just buried and tarmacked over.
:)
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Ah, so it was the DACS units that were evil in terms of DC voltages. I had completely forgotten about them.
Indeed, B*Cat.
Again, if memory serves correctly - they were only sat at 140Vdc for a few seconds once the pair of wires were 'broken down'. The connection between the Exchange DACS card and the remote DACS unit was obviously then lost ... and the Exchange DACS card would go into 'Metallic Bypass' (or, 'Mental Breakdown' as the lads would call it). This so the pair of wires revert back to 50Vdc.
That short period of time was just enough to wake you up though, especially when it was raining !! :'(
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Ah, DACS, the reason I could never get more than 33.6kbps when I was on dialup.
When I first contracted for ADSL (1Mbps!) they had to find the thing. Turned out it was buried under the pavement about 20 yards outside my house. No access box or anything, just buried and tarmacked over.
:)
That sounds like the Council's fault.
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I too remember DACS boxes, often telling my new domestic customers, back when I was doing consultancy work, that they needed first of all to get the wretched things removed. Which they generally succeeded in doing. BT did realise that the DACS boxes prevented access to all joy, gladness and goodness in your future life,
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I supposed they served a purpose at that point in the telecoms journey.
As engineers, we hated them ..... a right royal pain in the backside .... but we were just thankful DSL broke onto the market and a programme of DACS removal was introduced, as there were mutterings around that time of something called HAPS (I think that's what it was ??), that could give 10 independent dial-tones as opposed to the DACS's two. :'(
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I think I had a good 56k line, used to get close to mid 40s connection rate which I believed at the time was considered good.
I remember someone making an app for one dialup isp that used to boot you every 24 hours and added a prompt when dialling in to prevent connecting whilst no human present, it basically automatically navigated the prompt to allow for 24/7 connectivity, those were the days eh.
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Was Freeserve like that, kicking you off after a certain length of time? If I remember correctly, Demon, whom I used, didn’t kick you off - is that correct?
I used to get 49 k / 33k even out here! An exceptionally thick copper line because of the extreme length, and no neighbours at all once you have done the first mile from the exchange, so exceptionally quiet in electrical noise terms and even more so at those very low frequencies so RF from radio stations not an issue as it is with ADSL in the high downstream band.
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AFAIK they all kicked you off if you were on the flat-rate service?
I believe it was related to BT only allowing the call charge to be free for an hour so the ISP kicked you off to avoid you incurring charges.
It wasn't the best setup as ISPs still had chargeable numbers too and mine sent an e-mail out letting people know their number had changed. I misread it, and ended up using the chargeable number accruing a bill of hundreds of pounds. I believe they waived it in the end, but it wasn't fun.
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Ah, so it was the DACS units that were evil in terms of DC voltages. I had completely forgotten about them.
The +80/-80V on a teleprinter line could give you a jolt too. :'(