[lifeisstillgood]

Old timer story - years ago, Demon Internet (my old employer) was beginning to enter super-growth and wanted to really set itself up for trans-atlantic connections. So they decided to buy a T1 - 45Mbps link across the atlantic. Now it turns out that BT had only ever resold fractions of T1s - they had never actually had anyone want a whole one. And as such their sales commissions did not cap out.

So, we rang up, a sales guy picked up the phone and got a million pound pay day, and resigned that evening.

But our customers were happy so thats what counts :-)

[squigg]

As a Future Sound of London fan, I was so proud to be an early Demon dial-up customer when they name-checked their email address on Demon on their ground-breaking ISDN radio transmission on Radio 1. (To be read in a monotone female delivery) "For further information, please access the following code ... F S O L .. ACK ... F S O L ... DEMON ... CO ... UK"

Good times - they were a wonderful company, thank you

[bagpuss]

For further information on any aspect of this broadcast contact PO BOX 1871. London W10 5ZL. Copyright has been retained in the sound and visual.

[squigg]

I was wrong - initial section I meant starts "For internet connection, please access the following code ...."

https://youtu.be/_8SBdkru4IY?t=128 At 2:26

[john37386]

T1 maximum speed 1.544 Mbps T3 is about ~45 Mbps

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier

[lifeisstillgood]

My memory is very hazy - too many beers in North London pubs far too many years ago to remember clearly :-0

[hazeii]

And it was probably an E3 (Uk/Europe is E1/E3, US/JP is T1/T3)

[morei]

E3 is ~34Mbps, so it probably wasn't. It's true that the E1/E2/E3 hierarchy is used outside the US, but links to the US can be either depending on carrier preference.

The T1/T2/T3 and E1/E2/E3 hierarchies join at the STM-1 level: An STM-1 can be subdivided as 4 x E3s or 3 x T3s.

This means that on a EU<->US SDH link, an STM-1 can be demuxed into either E3s or T3s, so you can have both standards on the same fiber.

[tinus_hn]

In internetworking a Tier 1 carrier is a carrier that is so interconnected other parties pay to receive traffic from them.

[zenexer]

T1 and Tier 1 are not the same thing.

[tinus_hn]

That’s true. However at least in my memory back in the day people would call the 10 megabit directly connected university connections t1 lines, because of the tier 1 thing.

[walrus01]

On a slightly later time scale, I still remember the time I first saw a OC192 linecard in a router in person, at a major IX point, and how incredibly impressed I was. This was in the era when a transcontinental, or submarine transatlantic OC192/STM64 circuit was an astonishingly huge amount of money every month.

[chasd00]

The remember seeing one of those in a Uunet data center in north Dallas in the 90s. I was amazed at the tech and also amazed how ordinary it looked.

[ASinclair]

Great story!