I maintained some backend Linux dialup PPP infrastructure at a company called ConnectSoft back in the late 90s who sold clip-art and fonts "online" via dialup, as well as selling a reasonably popular Windows Email client. I had a number of phone lines at home, and would occasionally use the Linux EQL[0] driver to bind together up to 4 PPP sessions using 56kb modems. There is nothing you can do about lousy modem latency, but the bandwidth felt very luxurious and futuristic at the time.
> Multilink PPP technology was one possible solution to faster internet connectivity before ISDN and ADSL connectivity became widespread
Oddly enough, mlppp was used in my area to bond multiple adsl1 lines together. Too bad most of that history died with the shutdown of dslreports/broadbandreports.com
I used to work at a DoorDash-type company in the early 2000s. Back then, we passed the orders onto the restaurant by faxing them. We had a machine with I believe 16 modems (might have been 20?) attached to do the faxing. I would have loved to try something like this with that setup.
I got one of these surplus from an Exxon lab where they upgraded.
From the instrument company they had a 4-channel RS-232 "Autoswitch" you could wire into the serial port from 4 instruments, then the fifth cable ran to a dumb terminal CRT console, and you could access any one of the instruments by sending unique control codes to switch communication channels.
Those Autoswitches were about a $1000 option. Instead, most people who were doing something like this used a manual switch from Radio Shack that was about 50 bucks.
Alternatively, you could unplug the local CRT terminal and connect the serial cable to a phone modem instead. Your instruments then had a telephone number.
You could then call from anywhere to access the data and control the instruments. As long as you had a modem and terminal at any remote location. Long-distance charges may apply :)
Using 1980's design equipment.
In 2001 the Sony smartphone made it possible to remotely call in on a cellular, link it to your laptop by infrared, and use Hyperterminal in Windows XP instead of a local CRT if you wanted to also. They had this to an extent before XP, Bluetooth, and USB anyway.
But with a manual switch you couldn't switch instruments remotely 24/7 unless there was somebody on site 24/7, not without an autoswitch.
At Exxon, 4 channels was not enough, and there were AT&T rack units like this, way more powerful, with built-in modems for direct connection to the phone lines.
Never did use the rack one I got since all my instruments were in the same lab at the time, and before I could make a move, ethernet became dominant which joined each instrument's PC quite well when it was built into Windows, instead of having to join instruments together in some way beforehand.
All I had to do so I could have a PC for each of the old RS-232 instruments was to "just" write my own code to accomplish both, "concurrently" for instruments never designed for DOS interfacing, much less Windows.
They are using VoIP hardware, but it's not actually VoIP (which would be limited to 33kbps, they are connecting at 44kbps).
The 56k modem standard actually abuses the T1 digital voice signalling that telephone exchanges were using in the 90s/2000s. It only works when the ISP modems are connected via digital T1 lines, and the telephone connection remains digital right up until your local exchange before being converted to analog.
56k modems only work if one side of the link is digital, a pure analog connection, or any digital signalling that didn't match the exact standard telecommunication companies were using back then simply wouldn't work. So they have set up their VoIP hardware to convert directly from analog telephone lines to a bundled T1 PRI connection, which is fed into the ISP's modem bank.
It was a fun experiment done by a couple of people who acquired the equipment from a defunct ISP (and likely elsewhere) to see what could be done with period equipment. It's not a question of would you do it, but could you do it. Even after considering the cost of phone lines, the modems they used would have cost a few thousand and the multiple multi-port serial adapters weren't cheap either (they were planning to use two 8 port cards, which had conflicting drivers).
As for doing it over VoIP, the box they used appeared to be the sort of thing installed in offices to support multiple phone lines. I wouldn't be surprised if they could bypass the VoIP functionality altogether since they were making internal calls.
The key is to use a non-compressed codec such as G.711u/a-law, and disable echo and silence suppression. I can regularly get 28.8k-33.6k carrier speeds across the US when using an ITSP/VoIP provider and my modems connected to Grandstream/Linksys/Cisco analog telephone adapters.
There's a certain subculture who enjoys connecting machines to the modern internet which have absolutely no business being on the modern internet, and thus only have modems.
Dreamcast Quake 2 matches were one of the most popular uses last I checked
>"Business line" made the first one look like a loss leader.
That's exactly what it was.
According to monopoly regulation, the vast number of residential phone lines were intended to be subsidized by the lesser number of business lines from the beginning.
Back in the day, there was occasional talk/accounts of "shotgunning" two modems on two separate landlines. Now we know it would work on a dozen, well done.
In the early 90's I started my company out with the minimum expected, two business lines, one for listing in the directory and the other unlisted for faxes like everybody else.
You could list your fax number if you wanted to but that was likely to get you more fax spam.
It was expected if you wanted people to have your fax number, you would do that the way you wanted to. Subway sandwiches always listed their fax number and put it in their ads, at noon there would be numerous people breezing through the line who had faxed in a Subway order form from the office. About the equivalent of ordering in advance from the app today.
I mainly faxed outgoing finished paperwork manually (that had been autoprinted by my 80's Exxon Intelligent Typewriters) or recieved confirmation of international orders that I already knew were coming [0] so when I got the internet I could basically tie up my fax line a lot without missing any incoming calls on the main number. When I was there after hours though, I could tie up both lines and I did that a lot to double my download speed. IIRC joining two modems in Windows became possible in W95 or W98 but I never actually did that.
Just used two PCs on two desks with one running the business ISP account and the other dialing-up to the home account.
Napstering in stereo screech :)
[0] My own company was the first marine place I worked where it didn't start out needing a Telex to serve as official cable confirmation of job orders. In the early 80's nobody had ever heard of fax machines because they were called telecopiers. Where you manually clamped a letter-size piece of thermal-sensitive paper onto a horizontal drum to receive a page. We had some of the better ones called Exxon Qyp where you talked to the other party using phones that were wired into the Qyp, then pushed the button to go into copier mode and it acted like an Edison phonograph cylinder where the sender ran its scanning head around the cylinder from top to bottom on their original document, simultaneously the reciever would run its thermal bit-printing head in the same pattern down their blank media page. As line speeds increased beyond 300bps, more modern machines became possible to send a page at a time, with digital memory no longer expensive as unobtainium, buffers came along. But it still wasn't good enough, you still needed a Telex until one day these documents finally became officially acceptable, as . . . wait for it . . . facsimilies.
That would have been pretty good back in the day. I don't recall when the BoStream people started to first appear but they started to push 1mbit/s or more and the 56k modems felt very slow in comparison.
I don't miss tweaking all the counter strike settings to try and optimise for the latency to the servers I played on and the limitations of bandwidth nor loosing the only phone. Everything was so much slower.
In 1998, my hometown (>100K population) had an uplink of 2 bonded USR modems over a pair of dedicated phone lines to the regional capital about 100km away. This uplink fed two ISPs with 5 and 4 dial-up phone lines. The smaller one bought a DirecPC card to feed its dial-up clients and advertised it as "high-speed internet access".
Dear lord my region was blessed with cable internet in 1995. Wasn't fast but it was really affordable and the latency was better than dial up. Though once it got crowded during peak hours it crumbled to a halt.
The cable lines here were so overcommitted that it was faster to get a lesser ADSL connection, ping was also horrible during rush hours. Unless you did all your downloads and gaming at night, then you were fine.
The article is on Tom's Hardware. But the project is by The Serial Port on YouTube. Tons of great videos exploring networking, ISPs, and old systems on that channel.
I feel like I remember seeing a 112k modem with 2 phone lines in a magazine once. Yep. It was made by Diamond, who also made some early graphics cards.
That was mentioned in the article, the Shotgun. It required two phone lines and for many ISPs two accounts. For that price you could have gotten an ISDN line and has better performance even with similar bandwidth.
At least in socal Pacific Bell territory, ISDN didn't have an unlimited tariff, so you'd be paying per minute when you were online, and a lot of ISPs charged more for ISDN as well.
My house only supported 24K modem speed due to loop length but I discovered they (Qwest) could provide basic rate ISDN. There was a tarrif that allowed unlimited long distance connections and so I dialed into UUNet in Virginia, permanently. Latency was excellent.
So it was. I didn’t see it the first time. We got one of their graphics cards for Christmas and my Dad ended up having to buy a new motherboard to support it haha. Back when things weren’t nearly as standardized as they are today, and were also moving very fast.
Neat. I remember when the X2, 56K, and V.92 came out and made previously painfully-slow 28.8K modem speeds less terrible by comparison, which itself a nearly performance doubling of 14.4K modems.
A reminder that first bit/byte/packet/etc. latency can never be reduced by adding more channels.
I maintained some backend Linux dialup PPP infrastructure at a company called ConnectSoft back in the late 90s who sold clip-art and fonts "online" via dialup, as well as selling a reasonably popular Windows Email client. I had a number of phone lines at home, and would occasionally use the Linux EQL[0] driver to bind together up to 4 PPP sessions using 56kb modems. There is nothing you can do about lousy modem latency, but the bandwidth felt very luxurious and futuristic at the time.
[0]: https://docs.kernel.org/networking/eql.html
The Serial Port is an awesome YT channel[0], don’t miss their second channel The Parallel port[1].
[0]: https://youtu.be/LZ259Jx8MQY?si=w4ttuV-kqoRQykmI
[1]: https://youtube.com/@theparallelport?si=Go4gTh6JKVypCx84
They have a ton of documentaries about the early internet, including interviews with people part of a particular scene at that time.
> Multilink PPP technology was one possible solution to faster internet connectivity before ISDN and ADSL connectivity became widespread
Oddly enough, mlppp was used in my area to bond multiple adsl1 lines together. Too bad most of that history died with the shutdown of dslreports/broadbandreports.com
I used to work at a DoorDash-type company in the early 2000s. Back then, we passed the orders onto the restaurant by faxing them. We had a machine with I believe 16 modems (might have been 20?) attached to do the faxing. I would have loved to try something like this with that setup.
I got one of these surplus from an Exxon lab where they upgraded.
From the instrument company they had a 4-channel RS-232 "Autoswitch" you could wire into the serial port from 4 instruments, then the fifth cable ran to a dumb terminal CRT console, and you could access any one of the instruments by sending unique control codes to switch communication channels.
Those Autoswitches were about a $1000 option. Instead, most people who were doing something like this used a manual switch from Radio Shack that was about 50 bucks.
Alternatively, you could unplug the local CRT terminal and connect the serial cable to a phone modem instead. Your instruments then had a telephone number.
You could then call from anywhere to access the data and control the instruments. As long as you had a modem and terminal at any remote location. Long-distance charges may apply :)
Using 1980's design equipment.
In 2001 the Sony smartphone made it possible to remotely call in on a cellular, link it to your laptop by infrared, and use Hyperterminal in Windows XP instead of a local CRT if you wanted to also. They had this to an extent before XP, Bluetooth, and USB anyway.
But with a manual switch you couldn't switch instruments remotely 24/7 unless there was somebody on site 24/7, not without an autoswitch.
At Exxon, 4 channels was not enough, and there were AT&T rack units like this, way more powerful, with built-in modems for direct connection to the phone lines.
Never did use the rack one I got since all my instruments were in the same lab at the time, and before I could make a move, ethernet became dominant which joined each instrument's PC quite well when it was built into Windows, instead of having to join instruments together in some way beforehand.
All I had to do so I could have a PC for each of the old RS-232 instruments was to "just" write my own code to accomplish both, "concurrently" for instruments never designed for DOS interfacing, much less Windows.
I remember the jump from 28.8k to 33.6k around 1996/97. That seemed like a godsend and then 56K came along. By then I was using Road Runner broadband.
They ran real dialup modems over VoIP??? Didn’t think it worked that way.
Of course 12 physical phone lines to a residence would be eye wateringly expensive…
They are using VoIP hardware, but it's not actually VoIP (which would be limited to 33kbps, they are connecting at 44kbps).
The 56k modem standard actually abuses the T1 digital voice signalling that telephone exchanges were using in the 90s/2000s. It only works when the ISP modems are connected via digital T1 lines, and the telephone connection remains digital right up until your local exchange before being converted to analog.
56k modems only work if one side of the link is digital, a pure analog connection, or any digital signalling that didn't match the exact standard telecommunication companies were using back then simply wouldn't work. So they have set up their VoIP hardware to convert directly from analog telephone lines to a bundled T1 PRI connection, which is fed into the ISP's modem bank.
They go into a lot of detail on this setup in "DIAL-UP goes DIGITAL: Setting up PRI for the TOTAL CONTROL - ISP Ep 7" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ0KTtMQ_8s
The earlier episodes are good too, but that one covers getting 56k modems working.
It was a fun experiment done by a couple of people who acquired the equipment from a defunct ISP (and likely elsewhere) to see what could be done with period equipment. It's not a question of would you do it, but could you do it. Even after considering the cost of phone lines, the modems they used would have cost a few thousand and the multiple multi-port serial adapters weren't cheap either (they were planning to use two 8 port cards, which had conflicting drivers).
As for doing it over VoIP, the box they used appeared to be the sort of thing installed in offices to support multiple phone lines. I wouldn't be surprised if they could bypass the VoIP functionality altogether since they were making internal calls.
The key is to use a non-compressed codec such as G.711u/a-law, and disable echo and silence suppression. I can regularly get 28.8k-33.6k carrier speeds across the US when using an ITSP/VoIP provider and my modems connected to Grandstream/Linksys/Cisco analog telephone adapters.
I have to ask, why are you regularly using dialup over VoIP across the US?
Vintage bulletin boards and running a retro UUCP network
There's a certain subculture who enjoys connecting machines to the modern internet which have absolutely no business being on the modern internet, and thus only have modems.
Dreamcast Quake 2 matches were one of the most popular uses last I checked
The price they charged to install a second one, "Business line" made the first one look like a loss leader.
>"Business line" made the first one look like a loss leader.
That's exactly what it was.
According to monopoly regulation, the vast number of residential phone lines were intended to be subsidized by the lesser number of business lines from the beginning.
Back in the day, there was occasional talk/accounts of "shotgunning" two modems on two separate landlines. Now we know it would work on a dozen, well done.
In the early 90's I started my company out with the minimum expected, two business lines, one for listing in the directory and the other unlisted for faxes like everybody else.
You could list your fax number if you wanted to but that was likely to get you more fax spam.
It was expected if you wanted people to have your fax number, you would do that the way you wanted to. Subway sandwiches always listed their fax number and put it in their ads, at noon there would be numerous people breezing through the line who had faxed in a Subway order form from the office. About the equivalent of ordering in advance from the app today.
I mainly faxed outgoing finished paperwork manually (that had been autoprinted by my 80's Exxon Intelligent Typewriters) or recieved confirmation of international orders that I already knew were coming [0] so when I got the internet I could basically tie up my fax line a lot without missing any incoming calls on the main number. When I was there after hours though, I could tie up both lines and I did that a lot to double my download speed. IIRC joining two modems in Windows became possible in W95 or W98 but I never actually did that.
Just used two PCs on two desks with one running the business ISP account and the other dialing-up to the home account.
Napstering in stereo screech :)
[0] My own company was the first marine place I worked where it didn't start out needing a Telex to serve as official cable confirmation of job orders. In the early 80's nobody had ever heard of fax machines because they were called telecopiers. Where you manually clamped a letter-size piece of thermal-sensitive paper onto a horizontal drum to receive a page. We had some of the better ones called Exxon Qyp where you talked to the other party using phones that were wired into the Qyp, then pushed the button to go into copier mode and it acted like an Edison phonograph cylinder where the sender ran its scanning head around the cylinder from top to bottom on their original document, simultaneously the reciever would run its thermal bit-printing head in the same pattern down their blank media page. As line speeds increased beyond 300bps, more modern machines became possible to send a page at a time, with digital memory no longer expensive as unobtainium, buffers came along. But it still wasn't good enough, you still needed a Telex until one day these documents finally became officially acceptable, as . . . wait for it . . . facsimilies.
That would have been pretty good back in the day. I don't recall when the BoStream people started to first appear but they started to push 1mbit/s or more and the 56k modems felt very slow in comparison.
I don't miss tweaking all the counter strike settings to try and optimise for the latency to the servers I played on and the limitations of bandwidth nor loosing the only phone. Everything was so much slower.
In 1998, my hometown (>100K population) had an uplink of 2 bonded USR modems over a pair of dedicated phone lines to the regional capital about 100km away. This uplink fed two ISPs with 5 and 4 dial-up phone lines. The smaller one bought a DirecPC card to feed its dial-up clients and advertised it as "high-speed internet access".
At that time, without SSL, a caching proxy server would bring a huge speed improvement.
This is exactly what I did. Squid + WCCP saved about 20% of the traffic.
1997 me is jealous.
Dear lord my region was blessed with cable internet in 1995. Wasn't fast but it was really affordable and the latency was better than dial up. Though once it got crowded during peak hours it crumbled to a halt.
The cable lines here were so overcommitted that it was faster to get a lesser ADSL connection, ping was also horrible during rush hours. Unless you did all your downloads and gaming at night, then you were fine.
I wish the article had more details on the ISP side of the connection!
The article is on Tom's Hardware. But the project is by The Serial Port on YouTube. Tons of great videos exploring networking, ISPs, and old systems on that channel.
They ran it themselves, you'd have to watch their other videos.
I feel like I remember seeing a 112k modem with 2 phone lines in a magazine once. Yep. It was made by Diamond, who also made some early graphics cards.
That was mentioned in the article, the Shotgun. It required two phone lines and for many ISPs two accounts. For that price you could have gotten an ISDN line and has better performance even with similar bandwidth.
Not if you grew up in the middle of nowhere like I did. I would have killed for that speed as a kid.
I was able to get 30-50 mbps when I finally got a smartphone I could tether in 2005. DSL didn't arrive where I grew up until probably 2012-2013.
At least in socal Pacific Bell territory, ISDN didn't have an unlimited tariff, so you'd be paying per minute when you were online, and a lot of ISPs charged more for ISDN as well.
My house only supported 24K modem speed due to loop length but I discovered they (Qwest) could provide basic rate ISDN. There was a tarrif that allowed unlimited long distance connections and so I dialed into UUNet in Virginia, permanently. Latency was excellent.
So it was. I didn’t see it the first time. We got one of their graphics cards for Christmas and my Dad ended up having to buy a new motherboard to support it haha. Back when things weren’t nearly as standardized as they are today, and were also moving very fast.
Neat. I remember when the X2, 56K, and V.92 came out and made previously painfully-slow 28.8K modem speeds less terrible by comparison, which itself a nearly performance doubling of 14.4K modems.
A reminder that first bit/byte/packet/etc. latency can never be reduced by adding more channels.