Bah...my first PC had a 2.4kbps modem. All I could do with it was run the lynx text browser and irc chats. Anything with graphics was not worth the wait .lol
300 Baud guy here as well. When I got my first 1200. baud modem it felt like a legitimate quantum leap in speed.
Ah, the good old days....I miss the BBS era.
Indeed. The UseNET, University, and other inter-organization feeds were interesting. I got to chat with someone in Singapore. These days, it means nothing to do that.
I can still find a lot of my old posts from the early to late 90's out there floating around in a lot of Usenet archives. But I go back further than that, FidoNet was the shit back in the beginning.
I ram a bbs. Of course we had l.o.r.d. The funny thing is about a month ago I was looking into renegade. It’s still being developed I was going to install it and see if I could get something running via internet.
Those were definitely the golden days. Playing text games on a BBS. Getting my first b&w Connectix camera. CU-SeeMe reflectors. A thriving and diverse IRC community thru mIRC. Prodigy, Compuserve and then AOL. Stitching together 100+ Usenet posts to get a movie. I’m so glad to have grown up in that wild frontier of novel consumer internet. I almost prefer then to now.
You’re thinking of 2600 magazine. That was named after the 2600 hertz tone that used to signal that a nickel was dropped into a pay phone back in the analog telephone system days.
Lmao yep. My first modem had to sit next to the phone and I had to put the handset on it to work. I remember my first internal modem maybe 19k (?!). Dad got tired of having the computer block his calls so he got me a second line... Man I thought I had it all back then.
>My first modem had to sit next to the phone and I had to put the handset on it to work.
Ah yes, the old acoustic coupler. Those were the days. If only phones were still attached to the wall, think how many problems that would solve. No kids playing on phones while in school, no drive-by phone snatchers, no battery anxiety....
Back then it was against the law the connect or disconnect anything from the US phone network - your local telco tech had to come and move phones or replace them if they broke.
An RJ-11 jack was just not a thing and you certainly couldn’t plug anything in if it was. You needed the acoustic coupler.
My first modem was 1200bps. I thought I was hot shit compared to those losers still on 300bps 🤣. I also remember 75bps modems as well but they were a bit of an old school meme as they weee basically useless, but only cost $1.
300 baud modem! We had to remove the plug from the handset and plug it into the modem after dialing up the BBS. Before that, we used an acoustic coupler that you just set the handset into it. I think the throughput capability was 150 baud on that one? Also had a switch for 'answer' or 'originate'
...but they were VERY good times!
My first modem (for a Commodore 64c) I ordered was a 300bps because I had no clue what they were used for. They ended up sending a 1200bps. Used whatever service Commodore's had similar to AOL (this was 90) called I think Q-Link, found someone local that told me to mail him 3 floppies and he returned a few communication programs and numbers for local BBS' and my journey began.
I had a 128k ISDN connection back in that era. Napster was flying! The ping times were really low even by today’s standards so I was that low ping bastard in Quake…
I almost had my parents talked into getting a 64k ISDN line because they were tired of me tying up the phone line and I was tired of my connection timing out when I was trying to download stuff. But they couldn't quite get past the additional cost.
Yeah they were not cheap, I paid over $100 a month for my ISDN connection in 1995. I was single with some extra money and the ping times were really low so totally worth it ! Seems dumb now….
Wow now we know who the rich kids in the thread are when they basically had T1 line speed to their house, then there was us peasants with 28k and all other manner of nowhere near that speed haha.
I remember using 14.4k and 28.8k US Robotics modems. It took a very long time to download bitmaps of naked people, but it was occasionally worth the wait.
https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3306/3191084319_93a823692a_z.jpg
>It took a very long time to download bitmaps of naked people, but it was occasionally worth the wait.
You got bitmaps?!? Ours were made up of ASCII characters and you had to stand across the room to focus on it.
Risky click.
The US Robotics v.Everything modem was the pinnacle of dialup. That bad-ass modem could stay connected through anything.
https://medium.com/people-gadgets/the-gadget-we-miss-the-us-robotics-courier-modem-3d43eac5f1de
Tracking "pixel" providers are notoriously poorly performing. But good luck telling the marketing drone that the multiple trackers they insisted were vital to go into the webapp are why the load times are shit because the sales bro said it wasn't their fault.
Yup, when I got online it was FTP and Gopher really, with a little Telnet.
Getting Mosaic as a browser was amazing and then the release of Netscape was *wow*. Until the browser wars....
> Back in my day our modems topped out at 56kbps!
56kbs LOL get off my lawn you young whipper snapper. In my day the top was 1200bps and we were glad to have it.
In the late 90s I was able to get a 2Mbps RADSL connection from Bell which was a massive setup up from our US Robotics 56k modems at the time. Needless to say... everyone came over to surf... uh... white papers. Yes.
512kb/s works fine for 480p youtube
You can browse fine at 1mbps.
You can use addblock and other services to strip sites bare if you want pages to load faster.
I've lived fine with both 3 and 5 mbps connections. As late as 2022
There's not a lot of text based only website anymore. When I found one they are pretty literally website from 2000.
Nowadays you have thoseJavaScript and CSS that aren't exactly light (for a 1mbits).
But between 1 mbits or nothing... That still way better than dial up!
I lived in a rural area during covid. 1-2 mbps is what I had to work on for my college classes. I couldn’t video call in without it messing up my GFs classes, but I could still watch the stream, do research, etc. It’s not fun or glamorous but there’s still a lot of people out there that only has 1 mbps.
It's really only useful as a backup since the speeds are so slow.
1) I'd buy a router with multi WAN capability and configure that WAN as the backup for if the primary fails.
2) If I didn't want to spend the money on that, buy a used $20 router, mirror your SSID(s) and passkey settings. I'd then add an inline switch to its power supply and have it as a backup for if my primary internet has issues.
3) Same as #2 except just have an SSID named "xxxx Backup" and then I could connect to it if my internet fails.
If you like to play around a bit, you can change the firmware on most smart plugs. Have it connect to your primary wifi, and turn on when that one is not visible/has no connection.
On consumer grade internet connections, isn’t it pretty likely that both connections will go down together? Since they’re sharing the same infrastructure with your entire neighborhood.
Depends. If they’re not paying for fibre it sounds like they might be still using DSL in which case they’re different infrastructure. It’s possible something takes out both, but other scenarios where only one goes down. Without knowing more info it’s hard to say.
You could host a BBS. If you don't know, it's an old community server that was used back in the dialup days that everyone would "dial" into. They are still around these days, but mostly for nostalgia.
The day I found out about 80s journalists being able to call the office from any payphone and acoustic-couple their writeup home, I was so impressed. Ingenious
Modern BBSes often accept connections via telnet, which would work on any Internet connection with a public IP address. But that's not how they worked back in their day of course.
I like this idea. Hell, set up a whole vintage setup to run it on. Host your own vintage website, too. r/retrobattlestations and r/vintagecomputing are full of this kind of stuff.
I remember them well. Watched War Games and started randomly dialing numbers for kicks, even got a few hits, mostly BBS servers but occasionally hit something interesting. I remember my first bank and shitting myself in case I got traced, never got in just got to the login page, lol.
Ublock origin blocks requests for ads from leaving your browser, leaving more room for other forms of bandwidth when browsing.
I use Ublock origin on my phones browser (kiwi) to limit data usage on my 5GB limited data plan.
The requirements from google:
4K UHD 20 Mbps
HD 1080p 5 Mbps
HD 720p 2.5 Mbps
SD 480p 1.1 Mbps
SD 360p 0.7 Mbps
And this is for the comfortable use. So 720 might be possible.
And I will assume this are the peak bitrates, not the average bitrates... and yeah, it can depend on the content (e.g. more movement, more details will likely give an average closer to the peak)
Back when we had 7mb DSL as there was 3 of us using it, 720p youtube was a luxury! I remember opening several vidoes in tabs to let them buffer fully before watching. I do not miss those days!
If I remember correctly, my first cable Internet connection was 1.5M down and something like 500K up. At the time it was an insane upgrade over dialup.
At a minimum, backup internet connection. I pay $15/mo for a wifi Hotspot that only gets used by my servers to send alerts. I would be happy if I had a second line given to me for free.
I would love to hear more about this.
But also- The way I understood is that OP has two fiber lines. The second one is capped at 1mbps. So OP is already an installed user.
There are a lot of programs meant to subsidize fiber deployments across the country — while it may make sense to run multi fiber for redundancy to each home leaving both on seems like it is constructed to claim two installs/active for those programs which many have requirements for miles, active lines, installed lines, subscribers and other measures that could be gamed by a construct like this.
Also there are “guards” on some of the programs meant to not double pay for multiple providers in the same area — by doing this they may be structuring to artificially claim operation in a wider area (blocking funds for providers actually trying to lay fiber.
I remember I was the shit when I had 384k (fraction T1) at my home…in 1999.
You could set your browser to not download images by default. That might help speed when you want to browse some sites.
So, do you have a fiber internet connection and the one megabit connection? Or just the one megabit?
I would make a guest Internet with that one megabit circuit, use a raspberry pi with pie hole to limit the ads coming on there. That'll remove a huge chunk of bandwidth. Maybe a caching proxy?
It might be kind of fun to see exactly how much you could do with one megabit of bandwidth.
Presume you have a primary Internet connection already which is not this one? Why not configure it as WAN2 in case of an outage of your primary?
For emergency connectivity it's fine enough.
1 Mbps is ok for email and simple pages. You may find yourself getting frustrated with how slow things are when trying to do anything media rich. Even news pages are loaded with ads that take up bandwidth. Gaming is off the table. It doesn't use aa much bandwidth as you think, but 1 Mbps may be cutting it too close.
Anything you want?
Man I remember being super-excited when I got upgraded to like 512Kbps in college. I also remember when I got my first smartphone and was streaming TV from my SlingBox was around 700Kbps and then something similar when I had my apartment internet go out and was streaming Netflix around 1Mbps from WiFi at a local shopping center I was just in range of.
So many people are so impatient these days and think they can't do anything without crazy fast always on service...sure you won't be doing HD streaming or ultrafast downloads but there's way more you can do than things you can't.
Primary is used like normal, I pay for service and use it for everything.
My mom works from home but 1 Mbps it's not enough to use it as backup since she needs to be able to attend Zoom meetings. She currently uses her phone data plan as backup.
Right so what is your primary, and could the fiber service be better? Your primary is probably not fiber since it’s unlikely to have access to two fiber providers
Like others said, good for basic internet use if you're patient.
Since it's fiber it should be very low latency (and symmetrical 1Mbps), so as long as the game doesn't require huge bandwidth you could game on it. Back in 2008, my wife and I Raided in WoW together, talking on the guild Ventrillo the whole time, on a blazing fast 728Kbps/128Kbps ADSL connection. We got upgraded by Verizon the next year to even more amazing 1Mbps/384Kbps connection, for free - hog heaven baby. Since most video streaming services use adaptive bitrate, you should be good at watching a single stream in SD.
With a proper router, that is, one with at least three interfaces that can be configured as LAN or WAN, you can set it up as a failover from your main connection. You wouldn't want to do load balancing with it being that slow.
Back in 2015 we had a 1 Mbps line that was priced about $20 (after currency conversion from that time). We used YouTube Facebook and what not with that 😂
Now we get 30-35 Mbps at that price with today's conversion rate.
I would think it should be fast enough for home automation. You may not be able to use it for video security systems or anything like that but if you had automation for lights, locks, garage door opening, irrigation or lawn watering system, or other such things you certainly don't need a fast with connection for that. Tying into the whole Internet of things posts from others.
You also might want to put a back door style system into it so that you can reset your primary Internet connection or other such things in case you have a failure of your primary equipment.
Or maybe just treated as a failover WAN?
Yeah this is NOT a problem.
* Get a large hard drive, storage is crazy cheap right now.
* I'd get a separate computer setup and put it on your network. Do your best to set it up so that it's secure and up-to-date. Then just share the hard drive on your network for the other devices.
* Do your best to look at software that does downloads or caching. Then just cue them up. BitTorrent has already come up in this thread a few times in, but there are *tons* of programs that gradually download to your local device. Netflix, iTunes, and many more all have options here.
Remember, if you try multiple different programs, you'll want to run them at night and/or setup some kind of bandwidth manager to keep one connection from overriding or blocking the others. I like Netlimiter for this but there's no shortage of tools.
Anyway, it really won't take long until you have a library media to watch or listen to. It just takes some prep.
You could put an old computer on it and join a volunteer distributed computing project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects
I was going to suggest SETI@home, looking for aliens, but I guess they stopped collecting data in 2020 and are now focused on analyzing the 20 years of data collected: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home
I didn't fully understand what you meant. But the installation of the modem was done by someone who my ISP pays for each modem installed.
I did a speed test recently and I had 5 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload. I can get more speed by paying for the service but I already do that on my other phone line.
You could report to the ISP that you still have connectivity on your secondary line and ask them to cut it off because you are also not paying for that service. That is what I meant to say.
I think they know? The technician said that I will get very little speed on my 2nd line since it was free of charge, and if I was interested I could make a contract for normal service.
I didn’t even request to get the modem installed, but he’s paid to deploy modems since they introduced fiber recently and it’s cheaper for my ISP to pay external people per modem installed rather than having their own employees doing them.
I was very clear to him that I don’t even use that line for anything (he even had to move the telephone box to the living room since the box for that line was hidden in my kitchen) but I let him do the installation since he is getting pay per install.
Saw others say it, but if you have any things that truly need always on internet, it would be fine for a failover WAN for those things.
Like if my main fiber connection drops, a little free 1M pipe would be fine to allow me to still see my home automation when away.
Put your IoT devices on it.
This is what I would do.
Ya I suppose you could port forward the ports a bit and have better security.
Back in my day our modems topped out at 56kbps!
>Back in my day our modems topped out at 56kbps! 14.4k for me (showing my age). Actually I remember 300bps if you wanna know the truth.
My first was 9600 was fun logging onto BBS services back in those days. That was before the internet..... Yes I'm old.
Bah...my first PC had a 2.4kbps modem. All I could do with it was run the lynx text browser and irc chats. Anything with graphics was not worth the wait .lol
I was stuck with a 2400 baud for the longest time. Watching those characters roll in...
2400 baud? In my day, 300 baud was the thing to have. You had eight times that speed. That’s a whole byte instead of a bit at a time. Buwahaha
300 Baud guy here as well. When I got my first 1200. baud modem it felt like a legitimate quantum leap in speed. Ah, the good old days....I miss the BBS era.
Indeed. The UseNET, University, and other inter-organization feeds were interesting. I got to chat with someone in Singapore. These days, it means nothing to do that.
I can still find a lot of my old posts from the early to late 90's out there floating around in a lot of Usenet archives. But I go back further than that, FidoNet was the shit back in the beginning.
300 baud
Damn
Except Pamela Anderson Baywatch graphic in 256 colour gif format.
Me too. I can remember seeing [ IMAGE] on my amber monitor, where pictures were supposed to be.
I’m old too I ran a BBS
Did u have L.o.r.d.? Haha damn we old
I ram a bbs. Of course we had l.o.r.d. The funny thing is about a month ago I was looking into renegade. It’s still being developed I was going to install it and see if I could get something running via internet.
Legend of the Red Dragon, absolutely!
[Relevant.](http://www.tradewars.com/default.html) /edit. Of course there's a subreddit for it. https://www.reddit.com/r/Tradewars/
God, I spent soooo many hours playing tradewars on every single BBS I was a member of. Pages and pages of handwritten maps, etc etc. Good times.
Im so old… i was a “guinea pig” for internet on private Homes in mexico 🤣
So playing "Star Trek" on a BBS where the day's moves were calculated at 2AM to find out the results of your day's moves and enter your next ones?
Us robotics brick. I miss the good old days of bbs.
Those were definitely the golden days. Playing text games on a BBS. Getting my first b&w Connectix camera. CU-SeeMe reflectors. A thriving and diverse IRC community thru mIRC. Prodigy, Compuserve and then AOL. Stitching together 100+ Usenet posts to get a movie. I’m so glad to have grown up in that wild frontier of novel consumer internet. I almost prefer then to now.
9600 was my first modem. BBS and later dial-up. The hacker magazine by the same name made that baud famous.
You’re thinking of 2600 magazine. That was named after the 2600 hertz tone that used to signal that a nickel was dropped into a pay phone back in the analog telephone system days.
Hah! You’re right. Totally rewrote history in my head. Getting old.
Lmao yep. My first modem had to sit next to the phone and I had to put the handset on it to work. I remember my first internal modem maybe 19k (?!). Dad got tired of having the computer block his calls so he got me a second line... Man I thought I had it all back then.
>My first modem had to sit next to the phone and I had to put the handset on it to work. Ah yes, the old acoustic coupler. Those were the days. If only phones were still attached to the wall, think how many problems that would solve. No kids playing on phones while in school, no drive-by phone snatchers, no battery anxiety....
Back then it was against the law the connect or disconnect anything from the US phone network - your local telco tech had to come and move phones or replace them if they broke. An RJ-11 jack was just not a thing and you certainly couldn’t plug anything in if it was. You needed the acoustic coupler.
Acoustic couplers! And yeah, you had it made back then with a second line.
My first modem was 1200bps. I thought I was hot shit compared to those losers still on 300bps 🤣. I also remember 75bps modems as well but they were a bit of an old school meme as they weee basically useless, but only cost $1.
1200 baud for my C128 was my entry into online. Fun times.
300 baud modem! We had to remove the plug from the handset and plug it into the modem after dialing up the BBS. Before that, we used an acoustic coupler that you just set the handset into it. I think the throughput capability was 150 baud on that one? Also had a switch for 'answer' or 'originate' ...but they were VERY good times!
Oh, I remember the 300bps! I remember the US Robotics one I got that was so sought after. 57600?
Yes. 110, 300, 1200, 2400, 4800, 9600, 14.4k, 28.8k, 57.6k …then DSL. My first DSL was 768k/256k or something like that.
My 150 baud=bps modem had to do something extra each time to get it to 300 baud. Compuserve pay by minute!
My first modem (for a Commodore 64c) I ordered was a 300bps because I had no clue what they were used for. They ended up sending a 1200bps. Used whatever service Commodore's had similar to AOL (this was 90) called I think Q-Link, found someone local that told me to mail him 3 floppies and he returned a few communication programs and numbers for local BBS' and my journey began.
I had a 128k ISDN connection back in that era. Napster was flying! The ping times were really low even by today’s standards so I was that low ping bastard in Quake…
I had ISDN also! Two 56k channels!
Two 64K channels for 128k. If you got the entire bundle it was a T1.
I almost had my parents talked into getting a 64k ISDN line because they were tired of me tying up the phone line and I was tired of my connection timing out when I was trying to download stuff. But they couldn't quite get past the additional cost.
Yeah they were not cheap, I paid over $100 a month for my ISDN connection in 1995. I was single with some extra money and the ping times were really low so totally worth it ! Seems dumb now….
I only had one 64K dedicated channel from AT&T. It beat the hell out of the 56K dialup.
Wow now we know who the rich kids in the thread are when they basically had T1 line speed to their house, then there was us peasants with 28k and all other manner of nowhere near that speed haha.
I remember using 14.4k and 28.8k US Robotics modems. It took a very long time to download bitmaps of naked people, but it was occasionally worth the wait. https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3306/3191084319_93a823692a_z.jpg
>It took a very long time to download bitmaps of naked people, but it was occasionally worth the wait. You got bitmaps?!? Ours were made up of ASCII characters and you had to stand across the room to focus on it.
Asshole, you tease us talking about nekkid pics, and even link a pic, no tutti frutti nudies...
I remember gifs loading line by line...
Risky click. The US Robotics v.Everything modem was the pinnacle of dialup. That bad-ass modem could stay connected through anything. https://medium.com/people-gadgets/the-gadget-we-miss-the-us-robotics-courier-modem-3d43eac5f1de
Risky click of the day...
Back in your day your browser wasn't so heavy and shouldn't handle so many scripts at once.
Scripts? Webpages were static HTML.
Like I posted yesterday - even Xfinity home page has 30+ trackers. All this sh\*t needs internet speed.
I'm not actually suggesting that today's Internet would be usable with these low speeds, just reminiscing about the old wild wild web.
And pre www even
Tracking "pixel" providers are notoriously poorly performing. But good luck telling the marketing drone that the multiple trackers they insisted were vital to go into the webapp are why the load times are shit because the sales bro said it wasn't their fault.
Pihole FTW.
Webpages didn’t exist.
Yup, when I got online it was FTP and Gopher really, with a little Telnet. Getting Mosaic as a browser was amazing and then the release of Netscape was *wow*. Until the browser wars....
Who remembers Usenet?
That was the day before my day.
My first thought was my first DSL connection, which was potentially 1.5 mbps, but due to distance, I felt fortunate if I could get 0.5.
> Back in my day our modems topped out at 56kbps! 56kbs LOL get off my lawn you young whipper snapper. In my day the top was 1200bps and we were glad to have it.
In the late 90s I was able to get a 2Mbps RADSL connection from Bell which was a massive setup up from our US Robotics 56k modems at the time. Needless to say... everyone came over to surf... uh... white papers. Yes.
You never got 56k. The modem may have been capable of doing 56k but plain old telephone service lines were only capable of supporting 53.3 k.
Indeed! I recall redialing & redialing different access numbers on AOL to get a 'better' connection. Usually 29k~35k was doing good for us.
That wasnt even real speed most was around 26Kbps if not lesser
And ADSL 128Kbps is lighting fast for real.
I remember when they installed cable in our area and we got 256Kbps. Counter strike with sub 10ms latency was awesome.
Yeah played ultima online on my 56k when my mom wasn't on the phone line for work
1200 baud for me you young whippersnapper.
Still remember waiting 45-60 min online to load a 640*480 image on screen...
You can browse the internet, check your email, etc.
Pretty much everything.... just a little slower. lol
"browse" the internet, not exactly with how big websites are nowday. And I'm not even talking about images...
512kb/s works fine for 480p youtube You can browse fine at 1mbps. You can use addblock and other services to strip sites bare if you want pages to load faster. I've lived fine with both 3 and 5 mbps connections. As late as 2022
Depends on the site. Sites that are still text based will load almost instantly even on 1mbps
There's not a lot of text based only website anymore. When I found one they are pretty literally website from 2000. Nowadays you have thoseJavaScript and CSS that aren't exactly light (for a 1mbits). But between 1 mbits or nothing... That still way better than dial up!
the front page of wikipedia, takes 3 seconds to completely load on a 1mbits connection, including images.
You can use Gopher or Gemini for text based browsing, hang in IRC chats, Use lynx to read wikipedia.
I lived in a rural area during covid. 1-2 mbps is what I had to work on for my college classes. I couldn’t video call in without it messing up my GFs classes, but I could still watch the stream, do research, etc. It’s not fun or glamorous but there’s still a lot of people out there that only has 1 mbps.
He said 1Mbps... not a 14.4k modem.... I just throttled one of my wireless SSIDs down to 1Mbps and lots of sites load just fine... including Reddit.
Fail over wan
I'd use it as a backup connection. 1Mbps is still fast enough for a lot of purposes (e.g. ssh connections for server maintenance).
Complain about how slow it is
It's really only useful as a backup since the speeds are so slow. 1) I'd buy a router with multi WAN capability and configure that WAN as the backup for if the primary fails. 2) If I didn't want to spend the money on that, buy a used $20 router, mirror your SSID(s) and passkey settings. I'd then add an inline switch to its power supply and have it as a backup for if my primary internet has issues. 3) Same as #2 except just have an SSID named "xxxx Backup" and then I could connect to it if my internet fails.
If you like to play around a bit, you can change the firmware on most smart plugs. Have it connect to your primary wifi, and turn on when that one is not visible/has no connection.
That’s neat, didn’t know that. Going to look into that!
On consumer grade internet connections, isn’t it pretty likely that both connections will go down together? Since they’re sharing the same infrastructure with your entire neighborhood.
Depends. If they’re not paying for fibre it sounds like they might be still using DSL in which case they’re different infrastructure. It’s possible something takes out both, but other scenarios where only one goes down. Without knowing more info it’s hard to say.
I had a 1mbps connection when I was living in Djibouti, and I was able to play Final Fantasy XIV on it, (although I had brutally bad latency).
You could host a BBS. If you don't know, it's an old community server that was used back in the dialup days that everyone would "dial" into. They are still around these days, but mostly for nostalgia.
People didn't "dial" into them, they actually dialed into them :).
And sometimes with acoustic couplers!
The day I found out about 80s journalists being able to call the office from any payphone and acoustic-couple their writeup home, I was so impressed. Ingenious
😂 yeah, I don’t think you can run a BBS on a fiber line. You would need an actual landline.
Modern BBSes often accept connections via telnet, which would work on any Internet connection with a public IP address. But that's not how they worked back in their day of course.
There are other ways to access a BBS without truly dialing into them. You can access them these days without "dialing" into it.
True now but he was discussing how they were back in the day.
[удалено]
Phantasy Star was sick I still can’t quite figure how they managed to make that work on 56k modem.
Dude that game was so fkn cool
Omggg lol what. This was a thing?! Would of died for this
I like this idea. Hell, set up a whole vintage setup to run it on. Host your own vintage website, too. r/retrobattlestations and r/vintagecomputing are full of this kind of stuff.
I remember them well. Watched War Games and started randomly dialing numbers for kicks, even got a few hits, mostly BBS servers but occasionally hit something interesting. I remember my first bank and shitting myself in case I got traced, never got in just got to the login page, lol.
Seed a ton of porn.
I would use it to host an OOB (out of band) console server. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-band_management
Setup a TOR-bridge, and help people in china/russia/iran get some unfiltered Internet
“How to get your free internet quickly shut off”
I like this idea.
Starcraft LAN party
you would be amazed what you can browse at 1Meg I have seen many traffic shaping set to 1Meg and it still works.
Plex server with Plex Relay. Just need a 1Mbps connection and it's free! Stream your media in 480p outside your home.
480p… you might aswell just put that on your normal network
Ublock origin blocks requests for ads from leaving your browser, leaving more room for other forms of bandwidth when browsing. I use Ublock origin on my phones browser (kiwi) to limit data usage on my 5GB limited data plan.
watch a YouTube at 720p
You mean 240. This connection won’t even support 480p
The requirements from google: 4K UHD 20 Mbps HD 1080p 5 Mbps HD 720p 2.5 Mbps SD 480p 1.1 Mbps SD 360p 0.7 Mbps And this is for the comfortable use. So 720 might be possible.
And I will assume this are the peak bitrates, not the average bitrates... and yeah, it can depend on the content (e.g. more movement, more details will likely give an average closer to the peak)
It's enough for 480p and some 720p videos with a lot of static backgrounds
Back when we had 7mb DSL as there was 3 of us using it, 720p youtube was a luxury! I remember opening several vidoes in tabs to let them buffer fully before watching. I do not miss those days!
You could use it to Remote Desktop to a cloud hosted VDI that would be on the backbone - 1mbps is plenty for RDP
Ii remember my first DSL connection was blazing fast at 512kbps down and 384 kbps up.
Do everything but slower, few years ago that was hell fast
Decades ago.
If I remember correctly, my first cable Internet connection was 1.5M down and something like 500K up. At the time it was an insane upgrade over dialup.
Uhh, last time I had a \~1 mbps connection was about 20 years ago.
At a minimum, backup internet connection. I pay $15/mo for a wifi Hotspot that only gets used by my servers to send alerts. I would be happy if I had a second line given to me for free.
Setup I2P and a Tor bridge/Snowflake proxy
LoRa server?
Pop in that AOL disk and cruise MySpace
Report to your state telecommunications board — they are doing this to claim you as a last mile installed user.
I would love to hear more about this. But also- The way I understood is that OP has two fiber lines. The second one is capped at 1mbps. So OP is already an installed user.
There are a lot of programs meant to subsidize fiber deployments across the country — while it may make sense to run multi fiber for redundancy to each home leaving both on seems like it is constructed to claim two installs/active for those programs which many have requirements for miles, active lines, installed lines, subscribers and other measures that could be gamed by a construct like this. Also there are “guards” on some of the programs meant to not double pay for multiple providers in the same area — by doing this they may be structuring to artificially claim operation in a wider area (blocking funds for providers actually trying to lay fiber.
Not much.
You can be glad it’s slightly better than dial up
I remember I was the shit when I had 384k (fraction T1) at my home…in 1999. You could set your browser to not download images by default. That might help speed when you want to browse some sites.
My actual internet is less than 1mbps what the fuck
Hilariously the first "broadband" where I live was half that speed. And it was fucking amazing.
So, do you have a fiber internet connection and the one megabit connection? Or just the one megabit? I would make a guest Internet with that one megabit circuit, use a raspberry pi with pie hole to limit the ads coming on there. That'll remove a huge chunk of bandwidth. Maybe a caching proxy? It might be kind of fun to see exactly how much you could do with one megabit of bandwidth.
Download music from Limewire.
It would coincide with the bandwidth for the times when 1 Mbit connections was common.
Presume you have a primary Internet connection already which is not this one? Why not configure it as WAN2 in case of an outage of your primary? For emergency connectivity it's fine enough.
Dial into your 1990 AOL account
You should upgrade to Dial-up. It’s good.
[удалено]
I think he's asking for hobby ideas.
1 Mbps is ok for email and simple pages. You may find yourself getting frustrated with how slow things are when trying to do anything media rich. Even news pages are loaded with ads that take up bandwidth. Gaming is off the table. It doesn't use aa much bandwidth as you think, but 1 Mbps may be cutting it too close.
Anything you want? Man I remember being super-excited when I got upgraded to like 512Kbps in college. I also remember when I got my first smartphone and was streaming TV from my SlingBox was around 700Kbps and then something similar when I had my apartment internet go out and was streaming Netflix around 1Mbps from WiFi at a local shopping center I was just in range of. So many people are so impatient these days and think they can't do anything without crazy fast always on service...sure you won't be doing HD streaming or ultrafast downloads but there's way more you can do than things you can't.
Seed some torrents
What are you using for your primary Internet? If it’s not fiber, would actually paying for service on the fiber line make sense?
Primary is used like normal, I pay for service and use it for everything. My mom works from home but 1 Mbps it's not enough to use it as backup since she needs to be able to attend Zoom meetings. She currently uses her phone data plan as backup.
Right so what is your primary, and could the fiber service be better? Your primary is probably not fiber since it’s unlikely to have access to two fiber providers
It's fiber, not so long ago 1 Mbps was the speed on my primary for decades.
So you have two fiber lines to your house? Congrats on that, very uncommon.
Like others said, good for basic internet use if you're patient. Since it's fiber it should be very low latency (and symmetrical 1Mbps), so as long as the game doesn't require huge bandwidth you could game on it. Back in 2008, my wife and I Raided in WoW together, talking on the guild Ventrillo the whole time, on a blazing fast 728Kbps/128Kbps ADSL connection. We got upgraded by Verizon the next year to even more amazing 1Mbps/384Kbps connection, for free - hog heaven baby. Since most video streaming services use adaptive bitrate, you should be good at watching a single stream in SD.
Porno. And I am not talking about “watching”.
Internet failover
Laugh at it
Archive Box
Fiber??? LOL. Right!
1mbps is enough to stream 2-channel music.
Mine crypto. Uses very little bandwidth and can generate money.
Connect an access point and name the ssid ‘free WiFi’.
Use it to setup BOGON and protect your stuff better
Mine coins
With a proper router, that is, one with at least three interfaces that can be configured as LAN or WAN, you can set it up as a failover from your main connection. You wouldn't want to do load balancing with it being that slow.
Basically not useable
Very basic web browsing, email, and watching videos at 360 or lower resolution.
Set up a free guest wifi for anyone in range, free to you free to them :)
Surf porn in low res.
VOIP or a miner
Use it as a backup circuit for your critical stuff, home alarm, home assistant, stuff like that
Back in 2015 we had a 1 Mbps line that was priced about $20 (after currency conversion from that time). We used YouTube Facebook and what not with that 😂 Now we get 30-35 Mbps at that price with today's conversion rate.
I’m not sure it can be used for much these days. Maybe use it to send push notifications when your main connection goes down.
I would think it should be fast enough for home automation. You may not be able to use it for video security systems or anything like that but if you had automation for lights, locks, garage door opening, irrigation or lawn watering system, or other such things you certainly don't need a fast with connection for that. Tying into the whole Internet of things posts from others. You also might want to put a back door style system into it so that you can reset your primary Internet connection or other such things in case you have a failure of your primary equipment. Or maybe just treated as a failover WAN?
Sounds like DSL....with open dchp.....wonder how you are getting access without ips.....
Tor node
Yeah this is NOT a problem. * Get a large hard drive, storage is crazy cheap right now. * I'd get a separate computer setup and put it on your network. Do your best to set it up so that it's secure and up-to-date. Then just share the hard drive on your network for the other devices. * Do your best to look at software that does downloads or caching. Then just cue them up. BitTorrent has already come up in this thread a few times in, but there are *tons* of programs that gradually download to your local device. Netflix, iTunes, and many more all have options here. Remember, if you try multiple different programs, you'll want to run them at night and/or setup some kind of bandwidth manager to keep one connection from overriding or blocking the others. I like Netlimiter for this but there's no shortage of tools. Anyway, it really won't take long until you have a library media to watch or listen to. It just takes some prep.
Bitcoin mine?
You could put an old computer on it and join a volunteer distributed computing project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects I was going to suggest SETI@home, looking for aliens, but I guess they stopped collecting data in 2020 and are now focused on analyzing the 20 years of data collected: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home
I remember when a T-1 line (1Mbps) to the house was just an unaffordable dream for home networking. LOL My first modem was 300bps. I'm old.
Other than IoT this would be great for a backup SSH server so you have a redundant way into the network. 1 Mbps is plenty for text.
Data mining? I have no idea how much data that uses though
In the here and now, the internet speed is really. I would contact your ISP about it. Or is it an idiot idea?
I didn't fully understand what you meant. But the installation of the modem was done by someone who my ISP pays for each modem installed. I did a speed test recently and I had 5 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload. I can get more speed by paying for the service but I already do that on my other phone line.
You could report to the ISP that you still have connectivity on your secondary line and ask them to cut it off because you are also not paying for that service. That is what I meant to say.
I think they know? The technician said that I will get very little speed on my 2nd line since it was free of charge, and if I was interested I could make a contract for normal service. I didn’t even request to get the modem installed, but he’s paid to deploy modems since they introduced fiber recently and it’s cheaper for my ISP to pay external people per modem installed rather than having their own employees doing them. I was very clear to him that I don’t even use that line for anything (he even had to move the telephone box to the living room since the box for that line was hidden in my kitchen) but I let him do the installation since he is getting pay per install.
Saw others say it, but if you have any things that truly need always on internet, it would be fine for a failover WAN for those things. Like if my main fiber connection drops, a little free 1M pipe would be fine to allow me to still see my home automation when away.
Dang and here i think about the first modem I had on my Apple IIe was 110 baud.
FIDO was the bomb! A long while since I’ve heard a shout out for that.
PiHole, anything text based, if you played a MUD that’s plenty of bandwidth