Historical Speeds

I'm trying to find what the most commonly offered internet speeds (residential) were over the years before fibre. I can't remember the upload speeds of when broadband was first introduced.

56K / 33.6K
512K / ?
1 / ?
2 / ?
8 / 448K
24 / 1
24 / 2.5
38 / 9.5
76 / 19

I know cable speeds from Blueyonder/Telewest were very different to ADSL, but I never used them.

News archive goes back to 2000 and this search http://www.thinkbroadband.com/archive/24.html?q=uplo... will give you lots of stuff to pull together

A sign of how things have changed is a speed test roundup from 2004
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/1664-top-10-faste...

No doubt it could found easily enough using Google, but the upload for 512kbps/ 1Mbits and 2Mbits ADSL from BT at the beginning was 256kbps.

Thanks. Surprisingly a lot higher than I expected.

Upload speeds were never widely advertised back then (or even now), and trying to search for definitive figures from that period of time proved more difficult than I thought. I did come across this list of bit rates / modems though.

I remember when the fastest that CompuServe offered was 9600.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

I remember when the fastest that CompuServe offered was 9600.

I remember 1200 / 600 was the fastest LOL

Mum wasn't too happy with the phone bill

Ah the good old BBS days.

Paul

I had a company phone line and when the US arm of CIS rolled out 19200 I used to dial New York

But surprisingly the UK got 36k first.

Anyone remember getting online at 33k with AOL?

In reply to a post by Andrue:

I had a company phone line and when the US arm of CIS rolled out 19200 I used to dial New York

But surprisingly the UK got 36k first.

It makes a change us getting something before the US, I bet they had a hissy fit about that

Paul

I remember been on an isp that offered unlimited use but would auto disconnect you after an hour, a friend of mine coded an app which auto redialed.

I remember having the 1024/248 fixed rate service, there would be several DSL dropouts per day on average. Quite surprising, to say that the downstream SNR margin would've been very high.

Edited by deleted (Sat 25-Mar-17 10:58:40)

In reply to a post by PaulKirby:

It makes a change us getting something before the US, I bet they had a hissy fit about that

Yeah. Although maybe it was 33k. Whatever it was came after 19200 I remember being a bit surprised. My vague memory is that we skipped 19200 so perhaps the US got new modems that time and we got new modems next time.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

In reply to a post by PaulKirby:

It makes a change us getting something before the US, I bet they had a hissy fit about that

Yeah. Although maybe it was 33k. Whatever it was came after 19200 I remember being a bit surprised. My vague memory is that we skipped 19200 so perhaps the US got new modems that time and we got new modems next time.

Well after my uncle took it back we had nothing until many years later when 9600 was around, but where it was only used for accessing BBS's to play door games or send Fido, Usernet messages etc we wasn't on that long, plus phone calls use to kill the connection

Ah those were the days

We then got a 57K6 (57,600) USB Modem which we used for a couple of years then ADSL started to get installed and we moved over to that.

Paul

Do you know why ADSL at first was so unstable?

In reply to a post by WilliamGrimsley:

Do you know why ADSL at first was so unstable?

Not offhand, no.

It might of been due to using certain frequency bands, or probably at the time we wasn't using twisted pair cables, so it was very prone to noise.

And also the phone line wasn't designed for data / broadband being sent over it.

So I say the latter.

I do also recall then being two separate white / creamish coloured devices, I still have them in my shed

Paul

Ah, I thought it may be that. Thanks for explaining.

And away back 1970s and 1980s, using Acoustic Couplers, some rigid, others flexible-

All in Bauds

110
300
1200/75 - Prince Philip's Account was apparently hacked.
1200

Used to watch the cursor/text position "crawl across the screen"

If I remember correctly, for all eventual working speeds, the initial handshaking was at 110 Baud.

It was about 1988 that I placed my first "on-line" order with Maplin, using one of the first AMSTRAD PCWs, 8256, ("Joyce") bought in October 1985, modified to an 8512 in August 1986.

In reply to a post by eckiedoo:

Used to watch the cursor/text position "crawl across the screen"

Ye gods. The one I used simply had a teleprinter. You typed on it and it replied.

Agreed, I also used teleprinters and paper tape.

And like my group, you probably wound the shorter lengths of tape in a "bow-tie" or "Figure 8" configuration, across and around thumb and pinkie, similar to cloth tapes in the clothing industry particularly the braiding on uniforms, so that they didn't tangle on going through the readers subsequently.

As the readers got faster, the dangers of paper cuts and burns.

Patching torn tapes with the specially-punched adhesive tapes.

I think folks today would be amazed at the eventual reading speeds, with the tape having to be run in to the large catching boxes after being read, with the subsequent re-winding.

Occasional hand-punching.

One of our team could easily read the tapes - my limit was the "CR-LF" combination.

The continuous "chattering" as the tapes were fed back through the teleprinters, to get a clean print-out, or to a barrel-type lineprinter with its hundreds of hammers.

I could tell when it was still faulty from about 20 feet away by the sounds it made, much to the amazement of the maintenance team, after declaring that it was repaired.

Some of the skills learned were useful when reviving an old player-piano, with its very wide paper tapes. Also using talcum powder as the lubricant on its wooden valving, from using graphite on an early Flight Simulator, Link Mark D.

for several years, we had ICL Termiprinters(?), with ferrite cores at each key.

A colleague had been a touch typist with typical mechanical typewriters, causing her to hit the Termiprinter keys rather hard, resulting in many breakages of the cores.

They were also prone to problems from the static produced by the nylon carpet tiles, so we got in to the habit of emptying the department kettle on them.

In reply to a post by PaulKirby:

In reply to a post by WilliamGrimsley:

Do you know why ADSL at first was so unstable?

Not offhand, no.

Was it unstable? We had a 2Mbps ADSL connection installed in 2000, early in the trials, and never saw a problem.

If there was a problem with stability on slightly-dodgy lines, it might have been because the original ADSL wasn't rate-adaptive. It either worked at the specified speed, or it didn't work at all.

If I remember correctly, the original 2Mbps ADSL was only supported on lines where attenuation measured less than 45dB.

In reply to a post by eckiedoo:

All in Bauds

110
300
1200/75 - Prince Philip's Account was apparently hacked.
1200

Used to watch the cursor/text position "crawl across the screen"

Yes - 1200/75 was my first online speed at home. My parents had to get the line changed from a party line before I was allowed to put a modem on it.

In reply to a post by eckiedoo:

Agreed, I also used teleprinters and paper tape.

Not quite, here.

However, my first datacomms (even before the 1200/75 modem) was between the Unix and Multics machines at university, using early X.25 protocols.

The unix machines had some nice "hhcp" (host to host copy) commands, but the Multics was a little old for that. As it got wired into a packet network, it was made to think it was actually using some paper tape equipment. It made for some strange command line instructions.

Fairly early on I had the 512/256. Had subsequent upgrades as soon as they became available to 1Mb, 2Mb, Max, ADSL2+ and then VDSL. Never had specific connection problems with any of those services - certainly wasn't unstable.

Our line was on the border of working and not working. Some days it synced fine, but some days it would resync several times.

Edited by deleted (Mon 27-Mar-17 11:41:18)

That could have been something specific to the line rather than generic to ADSL. Never had issues like that in 15+ years.

I wouldn't be surprised, up until just before we moved to VDSL in April 2015 we had loads of issues.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

In reply to a post by PaulKirby:

In reply to a post by WilliamGrimsley:

Do you know why ADSL at first was so unstable?

Not offhand, no.

Was it unstable? We had a 2Mbps ADSL connection installed in 2000, early in the trials, and never saw a problem.

If there was a problem with stability on slightly-dodgy lines, it might have been because the original ADSL wasn't rate-adaptive. It either worked at the specified speed, or it didn't work at all.

If I remember correctly, the original 2Mbps ADSL was only supported on lines where attenuation measured less than 45dB.

Well I was assuming WilliamGrimsley was asking in general.

But to answer your question, when we got ADSL first it was for Home Choice (Media Streaming Service) which didn't come with internet access.
When BT installed it they also replaced the whole drop wire from an untwisted 2 core (speaker like) grey cable to the current 4 or so core twisted cable and also installed a data extension to the room that had the hardware installed.

That lasted for about a year or so, then we stopped it or they stopped the service, then we got ADSL with Demon which I think was also either 1 Mbps or the 2Mbps, but I don't recall having any issues, but it was a long time ago.

But apart from that we had absolutely no issues what so ever.

Paul

In reply to a post by ian72:

That could have been something specific to the line rather than generic to ADSL. Never had issues like that in 15+ years.

Agreed, some old lines had thick 2-code (speaker like) grey cable drop wire, ours was that before the install.

The only issues we (as in several homes on our phone pole) had, was there is fracture breaks in the wad of cables going from our chamber to the PCP Cabinet.

That was why we dropped the whole copper line when our FTTP was installed.

This fracture would cause when it was windy or if it rained either a dead phone line with half the broadband speed (i.e. one wire broken) or nothing at all (either both wires or a short by water) and due to no other free pairs available, we had to lump it.

But that issue only started to happen over the last few years, but before then it was flawless

Paul

My parents old line used to have problems in the winter but that was because it was long with a number of connections that would break - affected the voice as well as broadband but that wasn't specific to ADSL or the early technology - just the fact it wasn't a very good line. There wasn't a generic issue with ADSL that I ever heard of just specific issues with specific lines.

lack of bitswapping probably.

I remember when I purchased my speedtouch 585, the shipped firmware had no bitswapping so I think the tech was new at the time (this was in my adsl max adaptive rate days), so I suspect when we had fixed speeds bitswapping was not widespread.

In reply to a post by TBUser2012:

38 / 9.5
76 / 19

These last 2 should be:
40/10
80/20

You've applied the arbitary advertising rules to them, which you haven't to the slower ones which are the actual technology limits.

In between there is also BT's 55/10.

Now you mention it, the 24/1 is also suspect. Normally 24/1.4 or 24/1.3, depending on which retailer's site you look at. 24/1 is/was definitely not commonly offered.

The FTTx speeds don't fit in with the OP's specification of "before fibre" anyway, and the below 512Kbps aren't broadband. Unless we include ISDN.