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Comment by xattt | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone that didn’t live inside the CO ever actually connect at 56k, or was this only the stuff of legends?

Edit: My personal max downlink record was 48 kbps, despite being subscribed to 56k service. This is why I ask. This also brings back memories of hovering the mouse cursor over the dial-up icon in the system tray in Windows to see your line speed.

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In the US reaching 56k was not possible. Sending at 56k required transmit levels above those allowed by the FCC. The maximum in the US over a perfect line was 53.3k. During that era I had a dedicated dual channel 128k ISDN connect at home provided by my work but while traveling I would occasionally get a 53.3k connection but 48k was more normal.

Owned an ISP. When we started we used USR Sportsters at 28.8k then flashed these up to support 33.6k. They were hooked up to Portmaster 2's.

As we went digital we used PM3's. I saw some 53k connections but it wasn't very common. Most common was 48k to 50k.

The PM2's were an amazing machine. We never had an issue with them in years of service. The PM3's were buggy until the later years. Eventually the firmware got good and they were very reliable. Rocky start though.

The ISPs I worked at used PM2s with "racks" of Sportsters mounted on wood or shelves. I remember many melted cases.

Later on a place I worked at used old PM2s to run serial consoles. The things used a lot of space, naturally.

We had ours on retail wire shelving, there was plenty of room and airflow. We used the PM2's as reverse consoles after we went digital too. Thank god we rarely had to use them. But they sure were reliable. I had many PM2's with 1000+ day uptimes.

I vaguely recall my family treating the link coming up at any less than 48k as a "hang up and try again" situation (possibly dialing into a different local access number). We did once move into a rental house where we couldn't get better than maybe 28k or 36k, but after a technician came out and swapped which pair of wires we were connecting through we had a much more stable connection that I think was operating at 56k more often than not.

Oh man this brings back memories of doing tech support back in the day. All those calls of people complaining about "slow speeds" we'd adjust the modem init string to report the port speed rather than the actual connection speed and people were so happy to see that 56k number.

In Brazil it was very common to use dial up until early 2000's. Connecting at 56k was usual.

56kbps was the theoretical upper limit download speed (at the expense of upload speed since the maximum duplex bandwidth was 64kbps) for 56k modems. Even in very good conditions these connections rarely broke 50kbps.

The max I ever saw with V.90 or V.92 over years of business travel in North America was about 47kbps. The mean was more like about 38kpbs.

The only time I was ever able to connect with anything close to a 56k connection was when my phone lines were upgraded to support ISDN and I’d have to make an old-school modem to modem call.

I remember speeds usually being 40+ kbit in Russia. On the rare occasion when I got anything slower than 40 I just disconnected and tried again.

> hovering the mouse cursor over the dial-up icon in the system tray in Windows to see your line speed

Didn't it show a bubble thing from that icon when you connected saying "WebPlus is connected, your speed is XX kbit/s"?

We had 56k until we upgraded to ADSL in 2003, I'm from Denmark.

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