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Comment by _joel | Hacker News Reader

I recall my dad getting bonded ISDN at his shop years ago (1996/7?) the jump from 28.8kbit (x2 56 was just out but only supported on some ISPs iirc) to 128kbit seemed like another world. So much so I'd lug my own PC down and pretty much spend all my Saturdays there. Good times

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128 kbps ISDN had just about 40 ms latency. A significant improvement to a modem, which had about 100 ms+ IIRC, often a lot more, even 500 ms+.

That low latency made ISDN feel fast, sometimes even better than the first ADSL 512-1024 kbps modems that used interleave error correction method. Interleaving caused latency to be about 60-70 ms IIRC, making the higher bandwidth ADSL connection feel slower.

Of course then there was 144 kbps IDSL, which was really 2x 64 kbps ISDN + 16 kbps ISDN control channel.

I remember my ISDN having closer to zero latency. It was kind of amazing watching Web pages jump onto the screen.

It feels like you're adding about 30-50ms onto the base latencoes here. Are you/were you fairly far from any major internet exchanges when ISDN and ADSL arrived?

IIRC, those were ping latencies to the first hop discovered by using traceroute.

ADSL was about 30-35 ms with fast path in use instead of interleave.

My experience with fast path ADSL was about 8 ms. I don't think I was on interleaved ADSL, but interleaved VDSL2 is about 20ms.

Was this in year 2000 or so?

I had ADSL1 at 6m/768k fast mode roughly 8ms latency from 2004-201x; the latency was pretty much constant (it did get slightly better when I replaced my modem after the first one died, but the improvement was less than a ms, but measurable). ADSL1 didn't change much after release afaik, changes came through ADSL2 and VDSL and such. The scourge that is PPP over Ethernet did become more popular later in the life of DSL though.

IDSL was the first "high speed" connection I ever had at home. What a dream it was compared to dialup! Always on and 3-4x faster than the best dialup connection could do.

The 2 x 64kbit was nice and all, but being able to surf all evening (reduced tariff) on 1 line and have the house phone available for incoming calls (for my parents) at the same time, that was the game changer for me. No more, "just 30 minutes internet tonight kids, I'm expecting an important call", just dial in at 8 and start the download manager for the entire evening.

I got very lucky about then when my father got his work to pay for bonded ISDN to our house in the middle of nowhere. Being able to connect to BBSes at 128kbit was insane.

But the big thing with ISDN and the internet was the latency. A bunch of mudding friends brought over their computers all the time since they could suddenly play with a latency almost as good as the older kids who played from their university dorms.

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