[jsjohnst]

In my smaller regional ISP we started off using USR courier and sportster modems with Cyclades cards before moving over to Livingston Port masters. I ended up selling the company before moving to all digital incoming lines (needed to support 56k modems).

[vidarh]

Did exactly the same.... We had sporters hanging off the wall for a while (couldn't pack them tightly due to the crappy ventilation on the Sporters, but they were light, so clamping the cables to a suitable plate and fitting it to the wall worked great....)

The local telco had problems supplying enough lines from the nearest exchange, so they ended up hanging a thick cable bundle in the trees for several hundred meters, make a hole in one of our windows and put a large multiplexer cabinet in our office... Then three months later we moved to different offices - they were not pleased.

[jsjohnst]

We got metal wire shelves and kept each shelf fairly close together (about 6-8 inches). We had 10 selves per rack and 18 modems per 3ft x 6ft shelf. 10 racks and related additional hardware (switches, terminals, routers, CSU/DSUs, etc) fit in about 600sq ft of office space with space to spare for technician workbenches. Could do much higher density these days of course, but it was the mid-90s and we thought we were doing good at the time.

[vidarh]

We didn't quite get to the size where we needed that before we sold off the dial up business (for a pittance; we contributed to accidentally set off a price war in our market with incumbents with deep pockets - it was no fun, but I learned a lot)

[jsjohnst]

I got lucky in that regard. The larger company in our area decided it was better to buy us out than compete on quality of service, so we were in a position to better negotiate terms of sale.