[ipdashc]

I know AT&T had its issues, but I've always wondered if it was a mistake to take down the monopoly. The amount of tech that came out of Bell Labs boggles the mind. And the reliability of the network at the time was, I've been told, incredible compared to today.

I suppose tech companies like Google are the modern equivalent, but they don't seem to do quite as much cool stuff.

[ssl-3]

It was ridiculously reliable. The telephone, as it was, Just Worked. The importance of this reliability was very ingrained in how they did things. (Which makes sense: When you've got many tens of millions of customer circuits to maintain, and the switching gear to cross-connect them, you need that stuff to work. The manpower required to maintain an unreliable system of that scale would be astronomically expensive.)

The one time in my life when the home phone didn't work in our house, I decided to wander out back to have a look. I saw a cable just dangling there in the alley that I visually traced back to the house.

I called the phone company from our other line (we had one for the modem) and reported this combination of no dialtone, and a down line. A truck appeared in less than 10 minutes. A short time after that, they knocked on the front door to say it was fixed, and speculated that maybe it'd been clipped by a truck or something.

If the old AT&T had purchased GitHub instead of Microsoft, it would be stodgy, featureless, grey, robustly-reliable, and delivered into homes and businesses over a dedicated copper circuit at profound monthly expense.

[topspin]

> It was ridiculously reliable.

Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, getting broadband was a problem where I lived. I oscillated among a few wireless internet providers (actual 802.11 Wifi to a repeater 11 miles away in one case,) and acoustic modems, as I changed properties.

For a couple years I used Qwest ISDN. That was by far the most reliable and consistent Internet I'd ever seen: it wasn't fast (128 Kbps,) but it never went down, and the latency and jitter was lower then anything I've had, then or since.

[ssl-3]

ISDN was awesome. I had that going on for a bit, too. It was great to experience parts of what some folks (mostly the French, IIRC) had commonly used for such a long time.

Nearly-instant dialup. And not just for a single ISP, but other ISPs as well: The circuit and the Internet service were provided by different entities.

Switch to a different ISP? No problem -- no appointments or installers making new holes in the house required. Just plug in a different phone number, username, password, and done.

And since each B channel was independent, one could do voice calls while the other did data -- dynamically, as-needed. Performance was resolute: Calls were perfect in their consistency, and data rates were precisely 64 kilobytes per second, per channel, symmetric, and not one bit more nor less -- and with constant latency (what jitter?).

And to not leave it to implication for those who don't know: An ISP wasn't required at all. Two people with ISDN could move data between their computers without involving the Internet. The circuits were switched in an any-to-any to fashion.

Want to play a two-player computer game a buddy, with voice chat, over ISDN in 1999? No problem: Use one B channel for data, the other for voice, and get gaming. The circuits are dedicated to these tasks for the duration of the game, and latency is a fixed constant (no Internet used at all, and no lag spikes either).

We've really lost something with the death of this point-to-point, circuit-switched technology. We're probably better off with the best-effort packet switched IP business we wound up using instead, but we've lost something nonetheless. It offered some neat opportunities and was a fun system to explore.

[topspin]

My ISDN was sold as "ISDL" by an ISP. Still had the performance you're describing, but it was tied to them. There was no dialing on my part: it was just always up. I'd pay for it today if an ISP offered it at a low cost, as a backup.

[ssl-3]

I missed the IDSL phase completely. I'm not even sure if it was ever available in my neck of the woods.

For me, it the continuum went like this: Dialup > ISDN > dialup > slow DOCSIS > faster VDSL > faster DOCSIS > [this is the part where I write a whole chapter about how there is fast, cheap gigabit fiber available in rural areas directly surrounding my small city, from multiple competing companies, but none within the city limits]

Anyway, IDSL. That technology skipped right by a lot of what was cool about ISDN. For me, real ISDN was always-on unless I disconnected it for some reason. While still "dialup" in the strictest sense, it was not infrequent to have sessions that went for months without any interruption at all. But I could also do anything else I wanted with it.

And backups: Apparently these days, a person can get a slice of Starlink pretty cheap. In this mode ("Standby Mode," IIRC), it provides a slow, always-on connection -- I think it's $5 per month for ~500Kbps.

The RV and snowbird communities hate it because it isn't free (they used to be able to pause service in off-season without monthly cost), but it sounds pretty good as a fixed, domestic backup: 500kbps is a lot more than 0. (And if this backup needs used for a long time or speed is important, then: 500kbps is way more than enough bandwidth to log in and pay for a month of real service.)

[topspin]

For me it was Dialup -> 802.11 @ 7 miles -> Dialup -> 802.11 @ 11 miles -> ISDN -> WISP -> DOCSIS via Comcast.

> this is the part where I write a whole chapter about how there is fast, cheap gigabit fiber available in rural areas

Not all of them. I'm in what amounts to the North Korea of 'murica: a place that is pitch black at night as seen by satellite photos. There is no fiber. Or, not infrequently, power. I'm on the edge of cable the service area, but it does work, so that's what I'm using.

Verizon built a tower 1/2 mile away, so now my 5G is all the bars, and I could get IP service that way if I wished. Then there is Starlink. Good times, I suppose.

[p_ing]

Playing TFC, I always got faster ping times than the early cable users. ISDN was great.

[topspin]

For me it was DAOC. The low latency allowed me to pull off melee combos consistently in PVP with a high alpha range class. That led to years of nerfs upon nerfs, and the game designer is still bitching about it all today.

[dylan604]

I think part of the reliability was from its simplicity and part of that was because it was analog. You're essentially just connect a pair of wires. The original routers were humans making those connections with patch cables.

The digitization of the system now put programs and computers in the mix, and I think readers here can appreciate the difficulty of having bug free code and 0 downtime in gear.

[CPLX]

I mean the old AT&T does exist. It’s called Verizon and it’s not that great.

[toast0]

Verizon decends from Bell ROCs, but not from the national AT&T company.

Current AT&T is the result of Bell ROCs buying out the national AT&T company.

But it's not the same company at all. The commitment to reliability is gone, the full vertical integration is gone, the monopoly revenues are gone. The market for phone calls is quite different as well.

It's a shame to have lost reliability and the increase in latency for audio is objectively bad and I don't know if we'll ever get back to near zero added latency on phone calls. Otoh, telecom competititon has driven much more capable and less expensive offerings, when they work.

[mmooss]

Those are lovely rose-colored glasses! :) My understanding is that they also charged high rates for calling the next city, and more for calling further, opposed / dragged their heels on new tech like broadband data .... Since then we have essentially free communication - voice, video, and text - anywhere in the world, several broadband technologies, cell phones, endless VOIP options, faxes (did AT&T support those?) ... in fact, landlines are mostly gone.

Just imagine the world without broadband. I don't love the phone systems of today in all respects, but there is no comparison.

[olyjohn]

Yeah I remember paying long distance fees to call to the next town that was a 15 minute drive away.