The holy grail was always someone at a university with a 100 Mbps connection. That was godlike back in the day when most people still had 56k dial-up and the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps.
1200 bps Unix shell access from TENet (Texas Educators’ Network) - thank you, Mr. Horner, my 9th grade US History teacher, for telling that nerdy girl who turned in all her papers in dot matrix print about what she could get her mother, a fellow teacher, to pay all of $5/year for.
Oh, and daring to have us look at Reconstruction’s sudden cut-off, Jim Crow and the fact that we were less than 30 years from its legal end in Texas, the Bonus Army, our rather late entry into WW2, the Japanese-American internment camps, and various shenanigans to do with the Vietnam War - you taught us that it’s possible to both love your country and to accept that it is by no means perfect.
I hope you’re enjoying a good retirement.
I have tiny recollection of this this but thanks to your comment I became acquainted with it again.
Thanks!
I still have ADSL. It's now 5 Mbps, but I don't recall what it was when dial up was common.
Higher speeds of DSL came along with ADSL2 in 2002/2003. There were higher than 1.5mbps before that, but you basically had to be across the street from the CO to get that.
Do you get cell service? We don't and that's actually the bigger hassle. Wi-Fi calling is kind of shit, and the coverage outside the house is appallingly unreliable. iMessage is frustratingly unreliable too. I'll be on Wi-Fi, but it won't have gotten synched up with Verizon and it'll refuse to send a message until it does.
We do have cell service. We're in an older 1950s development that was never rewired, but not far from newer developments.
The biggest problem for me is that downloads keep getting bigger and bigger. The latest AAA games are almost 100 GB and take days to download.
And either way, even that coverage is spotty and speed varies highly on the time of day that you're trying to use it.
All this is fine for a tertiary backup solution (behind Starlink) but not as a primary method of accessing the Internet.
That was the default speed for a long time.