The Internet Is Coming

[WillyB]

Having spent the past 18 years with extremely slow internet service we have been told we are getting "REAL" internet in the coming weeks.

I know many of you don't even think too much about your internet but we have spent these past 18 years with "up to" 10MB service. Yep, that's it! It has been painful to say the least. YouTube, Netfilx and all the other names we hear have never been a reality for us.

Just think what life is like with 10MB service.

We are excited to be joining the rest of the world! Yeah Us!

[Donna D.]

Originally Posted by WillyB

Having spent the past 18 years with extremely slow internet service we have been told we are getting "REAL" internet in the coming weeks.

I know many of you don't even think too much about your internet but we have spent these past 18 years with "up to" 10MB service. Yep, that's it! It has been painful to say the least. YouTube, Netfilx and all the other names we hear have never been a reality for us.

Just think what life is like with 10MB service.

We are excited to be joining the rest of the world! Yeah Us!

YAY you!


How many remember dial-up service and using a modem and the screechy scratchy sound as it dialed up? And then panicking when trying to send a paper to the prof before the deadline and yelling DON'T USE THE PHONE

[brroberts]

It’s expensive, but all I can get is 1-3Mb for $40 a month or StarLink portable 1-200Mb at $150 a month. I hate paying it, but it’s my only viable choice. We never move it, but can’t get fixed here.

[alanmalk]

Originally Posted by Donna D.

...

How many remember dial-up service and using a modem and the screechy scratchy sound as it dialed up?...

I remember using the Silent700 Texas Instrument terminal with its 300 baud modem. I do believe this was the slowest device on the planet.

[brroberts]

Dial up is slow for sure.

[Ron in BC]

Originally Posted by Donna D.

YAY you!


How many remember dial-up service and using a modem and the screechy scratchy sound as it dialed up? And then panicking when trying to send a paper to the prof before the deadline and yelling DON'T USE THE PHONE

Groan, don't remind me. Our first service was $5 a month for a whole 30 minutes online. This is one case where things have changed for the better.

Ron

[brroberts]

One of the oddities of life in Alaska was that our internet was much faster and 1/5th the cost of internet in Kansas 25 miles from the capital and 20 miles from the University of Kansas.

[WillyB]

Working from home through the Covid period doing Zoom Meetings with HughesNet has been a professional embarrassment.

I have tried every angle possible over the past 18 years to get good internet to no avail. Today's news is unbelievably exciting!!!!

Imagine what it was like trying to look at YouTube reviews on Escape Trailers to learn what makes these things worth buying. 12 Minute videos take 30-35 minutes to watch and then you're speed goes in the tank for the day and if you do that a few times your speed for the entire month is nearly gone.

I'm not sure if I can sleep tonight with all this excitement.

[jack sparrow]

How about...... before internet you had dial up to what was called "bulletin boards. They had message bases and information and very simplistic games.
Now if you want to talk slow.......... My Bulletin Board that I started and ran was equipped with a 300 baud modem, and a few years later I was able to get my hands on a 300/1200/2400 baud modem. Thought I was in high cotton then. Hard drive were nonexistent. But all in due time I bought one of the first hard drives that came to the public. It was a 20mb hard drive and it sold for $1000 bucks. I thought at that time I would never use all that space.


Mind you again.... This was all before internet......
We've come a long ways baby in a short time.


Internet was just coming alive in the early 90's with none other AOL..


JUST A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE......


Comments ??


Cheers....... and Happy Trails

[Nindy]

Your profile says St. Louis but you must be out away from the city to have that bad of internet! So, having grown up in KC I will refrain from the STL jokes, haha!

I will be moving to the poorest county in MO next year when my house is finished. Out in the boonies where all summer long you're competing for cell service with the Current and Jacks Fork River tourists. Can't wait to sample the poor internet choices in that part of the state!

Our first "modern" PC was a Gateway with 2 GB RAM and our friend who worked for IBM asked why we got such a sexy computer!

[Ops]

Many members of this forum are Boomers, all of whom can readily recall dial telephones, let alone dial-up-internet. I was working in the Northwest Territories in the late 90's and younger colleagues were talking about email addresses. My response was simply " ".
To quote a much used commercial - We've come a long way baby.

[UncleTim]

Originally Posted by jack sparrow

How about...... before internet you had dial up to what was called "bulletin boards. They had message bases and information and very simplistic games.
Now if you want to talk slow.......... My Bulletin Board that I started and ran was equipped with a 300 baud modem, and a few years later I was able to get my hands on a 300/1200/2400 baud modem. Thought I was in high cotton then. Hard drive were nonexistent. But all in due time I bought one of the first hard drives that came to the public. It was a 20mb hard drive and it sold for $1000 bucks. I thought at that time I would never use all that space.


Mind you again.... This was all before internet......
We've come a long ways baby in a short time.


Internet was just coming alive in the early 90's with none other AOL..


JUST A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE......


Comments ??


Cheers....... and Happy Trails

How about FidoNET! That was a bulletin board that offered some of the first email service. It would process everything at night and make it available as emails in the morning. 300 Baud was the slowest. I remember my first 1,200 baud modem. We thought we were hot!

Remember bulletin boards were just sectioned off portions of someone's hard drive that would let you surf it.

I had a Compuserve email address for 10 years before anyone used it. True!

[oldwave]

I spent 22 years working for the National Park Service IT working in many remote areas. I had modem banks early on to be able to do remote support for servers. 9600 baud. It was slow but we could get some remote configs working. I put a microwave link 55 miles across Lake Superior to Ilse Royale to remove the unreliable Satellite connections. We ran their voip phone system over that connection as well as web traffic. I think we got about 50 mbs. While I retired in 2017, I still keep in touch with some of my old colleagues and there is some Starlink being used in the remote areas as well as point to point links . It was a fun job to design solutions for connecting Rangers to the world. One funny instance at Theodore Roosevelt NPS north unit. I had connected a point to point link between the Visitor Center and Maintenance and it just had a line of site over a steep hill. My buddy Dave the local IT support and I were testing it and it was working great but all of a sudden stopped. We figured an antenna wire might not have been tightened enough so he went out to look and called me laughing. A big Buffalo was standing on the hill blocking the signal. We chuckled about that for a while.

[Mike G]

Yep, that old dial-up was sslllloooooowww.

Talk about changing tech... I just let my relatives know that we are letting the MagicJack voip phone number die this coming week. We kept it for a long time as an emergency backup to cellular. When my daughter read the email from me, she replied, "Did the '90s want their phone back?" She is raising kids that will never have heard a dial-up handshake, let alone a dial tone.

Heck, when I was growing up, one had to announce one's telephone number to the operator before being connected. I remember when my parents replaced the B&W tv with one of those huge 25" color consoles. Now look where we are.

[WillyB]

Originally Posted by Nindy

Your profile says St. Louis but you must be out away from the city to have that bad of internet!

We do live outside of town about 40 miles but the problem is my home is 1/4 mile off the main road on a new street. Given that it was a new street and my address is not on the main road the internet and cable providers refused to pull their services down our road for 18 years. Anyone who's address is on the main road they have up to 1 Gig service.

Imagine going from 10 mega, on a very good day, and throttled to a very small daily limit of usage and if you go over that amount your speed is dropped to dial up speed which could hit you for the entire month to 1 gig service.

It's not fun trying to book airfare when that happens and it takes 15 minutes just to pull up www.Southwest.com

I'm not sure we even speak this new fangled "high speed internet" language.

[Brian B-P]

Originally Posted by oldwave

I spent 22 years working for the National Park Service IT working in many remote areas. I had modem banks early on to be able to do remote support for servers. 9600 baud. It was slow but we could get some remote configs working.

I remember coordinating the installation of 9600 baud modems... as replacements for the 1200 baud modems that we had been using for support. You spoiled youngsters...

[Mike G]

I object to the baudy comments.


But at least you had sense not to add baudy pictures...of old modems.

[bborzell]

We built our house in 2004. Phone service was provided by Verizon who had bought the lines from a local telephone company that installed copper lines in the 1940s.

Internet service over the copper lines was horrible. We tried HughesNet which was compromised by data limits and super high overage costs.

Settled on a line of sight dish setup that talked to a tower about 4 miles away. Started out at 1Mb and eventually went up to 10 Mb but with significant reliability problems. That covered nearly 17 years.

Several months ago, Frontier, who bought out our old Verizon copper lines, strung Fiber Optic line as a result of an enforcement settlement where they plead out to charges of bait and switch as they allegedly sold FO speeds but provided bonded copper lines which was about as fast as soup cans connected by cotton strings.

We now have 2 GB service. Our fastest hardware can currently handle 1 GB, but we are ready.

[UncleTim]

Look how far we have come.

[WillyB]

Originally Posted by UncleTim

Look how far we have come.

Ha!

My HughesNet Gen 5 this morning is 18.5mbps Download (advertised "up to" 25) and Upload is a whopping 0.14mbps. (Yes that's ZERO POINT ONE FOUR) My data limit is 50 GB Per Month and is broken down small into daily limits for $80/month.