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by elevation 62 days ago
We used dialup until 1996, when we got a 10mbps cable internet connection, newly available in our 20k population town. We have never had a slower service plan than that since.
2 comments

Questioning this, because I worked with a sysadmin who was in an @Home/CableLabs DOCSIS beta region at about that same time, and we all envied him of course. That was in San Jose, CA.

So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)

> So what's the real story behind your piddlly little town getting bleeding edge cable internet service? (Or was it somewhere like Los Gatos?)

It was a commercial service - Bresnanlink, in a midwest university town. As I recall, the trickiest part was getting Internet Explorer suppress its urge to "dial up" and just use the stack you had in place. Prompted by another comment here, I've been trying to find some record of the configuration and service speed.

Firstly, you’ve spelled “megabits” wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate

Secondly, that 10 Mbps was only your downstream signaling rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_signaling_rate

Was your upstream via analog dialup?

The cable link was full duplex. I had friends whose service used dialup for the upstream but never heard good things about it - the latency made it frustrating and it seemed like a lot of apps weren't tuned to work well.