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Comment by mkoryak | Hacker News Reader

I remember how excited I was when I bought my usr 56k modem. I imaged how awesome it would be to download faster than 3.2k/s!! I plugged that bad boy in, and discovered that due to the phone lines in my area, I could now download at about 3.3k/s.

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I worked for a local ISP in the 90’s and can tell you you were not the only one. In my memory 56k modems were rarely reliably better than 33.6ks. Myself I seem to recall feeling luck to get around 40k connections.

I definitely remember redialing multiple times to try to get both a modem from the 56k bank (my ISP had a mix while switching over), and a connection going as fast as possible. I don't remember whether the max speeds I got were, but when downloading a "big" multi-MB file it was worth it to get a faster connection.

same experience, France had decent phone lines for audio, but the bandwidth 56k provided over those lines were rarely stable, falling even below 1kB wasn't uncommon.

Sure you mean 3.3KiloBytes per second. That would be about 30 kilobits per second.

Yes, if a 56k modem was running at full tilt you could get around 5kbytes per second.

Downloading SG1 episodes back in 2000 over a 56k modem was not quite the streaming experience we take for granted today :D

Lets not forget about V.42bis 4:1 best case compression ratio. V.92 upgraded to 6:1 V.44, but nobody used those anymore.

i'd have to download midi files for music. :-)

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