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.