Anybody who was using computers before 2000 can describe a broadband journey of how they communicated over the years. That journey mostly describes the broadband choices we each had in our neighborhood.
My broadband journey started sometime in the early 1980s. I had a TRS80 home computer from Radio Shack. I played around with programming and learned the basics of computing. But I really started to enjoy the computer when I discovered bulletin boards. I lived in Oakland, California, at the time, and there were hundreds of different bulletin boards available with a local call. These were text-based forums where you could type messages (punctuation often not allowed). I bought what I recall as a 300-baud modem that let me connect to different boards. I spent a lot of time on music, science fiction, and sports boards. About the same time, I joined CompuServe. I didn’t like the chat rooms there as much as I did the bulletin boards, but it was my first online introduction to being able to follow the news.
Over time, I upgraded to better computers. I eventually joined AOL and used it mostly for email and to play online trivia games. Dial-up modems by this point were up to 56 Kbps, a blazing speed compared to my first modem.
Since I was in the telecom industry, and I closely followed the development of DSL. I had moved to Maryland, and I recall buying DSL service from Verizon in late 2000 at a blazing speed of 1 Mbps. My office at the time was served by a T1 at 1.6 Mbps, shared by a dozen people. I recall being amazed that I could get 1 Mbps at home just for me. DSL was so much faster than dial-up that it felt like it ought to last for many years.
But it didn’t last. AOL and other web companies piled the web full of pictures, and 1 Mbps soon started feeling slow. A few years after getting DSL, I upgraded to a cable modem from Comcast. My recollection is that it delivered 3 Mbps download.
Verizon announced that it was building fiber in the DC suburbs, and I got on the waiting list years before the product launched. My neighborhood was one of the first neighborhoods to get FiOS fiber in Prince Georges County. I was the first customer in the county that Verizon tried to connect with FiOS voice and the Verizon installation crew was at my house for almost three days in 2004 trying to get voice to work. My FiOS connection gave me 30/5 Mbps, which felt like lightning at the time. At the time, I couldn’t figure out the benefit of having 5 Mbps upload, when most people didn’t even have 5 Mbps download.
My next move was a step backward. I moved to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. I scoped broadband before I went. The telephone copper network was so poor there that voice barely worked, and the cable company didn’t yet offer broadband. I subscribed to Broadband VI, a local WISP, and I got a solid connection because I bought a home in the shadow of one of their towers. I was on this service for almost a decade. It was reliable, and my average download speed at the end was around 5 Mbps – fast enough for working from home at the time.
When I moved back to the States, I bought a house that didn’t have broadband, but I wasn’t worried since Comcast had a pedestal at the end of my driveway. In a story that I am sure is familiar to many, Comcast customer service said my house couldn’t be served, and it took a few week of calls to convince them otherwise. Comcast wouldn’t sell me standalone broadband and forced me to buy a basic video package – the cable box went into the closet and was never used. My recollection is that my speed was 60 Mbps, and I got a notice after a while that speeds were unilaterally going to be upgraded to 100 Mbps.
I moved to Asheville, North Carolina and got Charter broadband – no other bundled products were required. My initial speed was 100 Mbps, but it eventually got upgraded to 200 Mbps, and we upgraded to 700 Mbps to try to get better WiFi distribution in our hundred-year old home.
Of all of the broadband products I’ve purchased, I think the 1 Mbps DSL modem from Verizon was my favorite. It was 30 time faster than dial-up and, for the first time, I felt freed from the limits of the connection technology. At the time, that was enough speed to do anything I wanted. I’m also still nostalgic about the beeps and boops of my first modem.
Feel free to share your broadband journey in the comments.
My first local computer terminal was a Model 28KSR Teletype, a Model 14 tape punch and a Model 19 tape reader. It’s speed was 45.5 bps. These all used a 5 level baudot code, so all my text strings were coded in the baudot code (not ASCII). Each byte of text used the upper 5 bits for the character to be printed and the lower three bits set to 1. For saving/reading data on the tape punch, each byte took 2 tape positions punches–a nibble per spot with the last bit in each position ignored as the tape was read. The computer had 512 bytes of RAM, and no ROM, so the programs were short. 🙂
My first remote computer terminal was a huge upgrade–a Model 35 ASR Teletype machine (ASCII) and a Bell 103 modem….dial the number, hear the tones, push the handset into the cups on the top of the modem. While the modem could do the amazing speeds of 300bps, the Teletype machine was limited to 110bps.
In college, there was a room with a DEC VT52, also with the same style Bell 103 modem, but this time it was at 300bps. The DEC VT52s in the regular computer labs were set to 9600bps. At home, I still had the Model 35ASR and a modem.
I found a Lear-Seegler terminal in the trash dumpster and I pulled it out, took it to one of the electronics labs and made the needed repairs. I sold the Model 35 and kept the Bell 103 modem.
Bulletin boards were a wonderful thing. I scraped enough money together to upgrade to a 1200bps modem and that was *fast*. At a swap meet I bought a broken 2400bps modem and was able to repair that (bad connector). I could keep up reading text coming in at 1200bps, but not at 2400bps. 2400bps was “screaming fast”.
Eventually a “clone” computer was purchased so I could use WordStar for my Master’s thesis.
PC Pursuit showed up somewhere in all of this. It was also dialup but used a packet network to connect to modems in distant cities, so the bulletin boards in distant cities were now available without the long distance charges. The transit time of the network was quite long so XMODEM file transfers were slow. YMODEM improved this., but Forsberg’s ZMODEM was the best solution.
33.6kbps (I think) and later 56kbps modems came along, then 1.5Mbps DSL, then 60Mbps (both ways!) DSL and after we moved to extreme rural, the DSL dropped to 20/2 Mbps..
Starlink is on my “horizon”.
I have a similar path with each new generation being ‘exciting’. Same with computers, generation on generation they were dramatically faster.
300 baud modem to start, bbs systems. climbed the dial-up ladder 14.4 through v.34 and v.90/92 though I was never really able to link up that fast. A local dial-up company and/or AOL. Of course with each bump in speed the web got more and more complex, liberal use of ‘high res’ images for backgrounds and other things that made pages load impossibly slow.
Got a 1Mbps DSL service for a bit but the phone lines were very rough so struggled to be usable. I worked for the dialup/phone company as a contractor running fiber at the time and ended up with a dozen pots lines and multilink dialup which was pretty great for a minute. 12x44kbps on a windows PC. These were the days when you had ONE device and it was directly plugged in!
AT&T brought their @home 5×1 service in and I was one of the first to get it. A friend of mine at the time had a brother at AT&T and he was first, I was like… 10th?
That progression up to 100Mbps cable and heavy oversells by AT&T, then a slew of replacements that swapped our territory out to keep the government happy, lead me to starting my own ISP.
My broadband journey… Hmm…
“I started out as a child” in the 1960s and -70s, and remember thinking that my hometown, Lexington Mass., was somewhat special… We had two mainframes frm DEC at the high school connected to the other schools in town — a PDP7, and a PDP11 that the school system used, and they allowed the students in town to link into the -7 on teletype and papertape. (Even with scheduling on the computers, counselors still managed to screw things up… but now they had a new entity to blame: “the computer did it.”)
Fast-forward to the late 1980s, and I was helping manage a gas station, trying to get the financials and orders for the station to work on a TRS80 ‘Trash-80’ Radio Shack computer. Hard to do with little or no memory or functionality.
Later took a CSR job at USSprint in Reston VA, and then a sales job with Cellular ONE. There were rumors of interconnectivity to our homes, but not for the minions, only the C-staff. I remember being chastised for making lists of customers and prospects on my home computer.
Installed a second phone line at the house for exclusive use dial-up connection. From this service I completed my Master’s in Telecom at GWU in 1998. And I thought I was on top of the telecom tech world. (HA!!)
In 2005 we moved to a bigger house and took the 2 phone lines with us. There were major problems since our provider was Cavalier Telephone & physical lines were through Bell Atlantic (later VZ). Everyone knew how to hook up new sales, but customer service was low-priority at best, “byzantine” in reality.
I was a relatively late adopter of home broadband… in or around 2010. Comcast and Verizon FiOS were both installing in the neighborhood, and I was waiting to see what everyone else thought. I did a small non-scientific poll of neighbors; who had which vendor and why? There turned out to be two camps… either they hated Verizon, and reluctantly chose Comcast; or they hated Comcast, and reluctantly chose Verizon. Wow…
I chose Verizon FiOS and have been happy with the speeds and reliability. Getting service techs way out to exurbs of Germantown to fix WiFi and network problems has been an continual exercise in frustration. I can reliably count on the fact that I am either first or last on the docket, no matter what is promised. And when the FiOS techs drop the ball, I kindly remind them that I have the MD Office of People’s Counsel on speed dial. (VZ has issued credits for some of their foibles.)
I was born in 1985, gamed a little bit on my dad’s computer starting around 2000 but no internet. I worked in agriculture full time till 2018, But, an important note. For a short time, 1+ years in 2009 I took a job at a computer repair store, then went back to ag. I learned in that time, the vary basics of HTML web pages. Built exactly one website for a client that cancelled right when I finished it. When I went back to my ag job, I saw a paper trail that could be converted to a web app. I taught myself how to write a full Apache/Mysql/PHP/HTML-Javascript web application, still with no internet. I lived out in the country. I would drive back to the computer repair store, download programming howto websites on flash drives (back then they were easy to copy, static HTML ), take them home and “recreate” them on my computer where I could take my time reading them. From that effort I built a program, around 30,000 lines of code, that handled around $2,000,000 of product every 24 hours, tracking and monitoring the whole process. Still no internet at home. In 2012 a friend that had worked with me at the computer shop ran across Ubiquiti. Went to a conference towards the end of the year, purchased 10 Nanobridge M5 radios and got myself and a couple other friends connected via point to point links from town about 10 miles away. Started selling to friends with PTMP. Now we have 4 fiber pops, 2 x 10G, 3x 1G fiber feeds, a DC presence, almost 400 broadcast AP’s spread across 100+ towers, and 850 subscribers. Almost every large business outside of town uses our service in the whole county and we’re making a dent on the ones in town as well. There were a lot of things outside of my control that fell together to make this happen. The only tiny bit of credit I can take is when something doesn’t work I beat on it until it does work. I don’t know how to give up. I’m not afraid to be the fool if I can learn something from it. I state my opinion strongly and then am happy to back up when I learn it’s wrong.
I guess I never really have bought internet from any company. I did have dial up for a tiny bit of time in town around 2009, but didn’t even know how to use it so it largely was a wasted service.
1985-1989: Dialup. CompuServe and BBSs. MCI Mail.
1990-97: Dialup. AOL, Netscape browser.
1998-2003: SBC ISDN (64kbs channels for voice and data)
2003-2007: IDSL (128kbs symmetric)
2007- 2013: Fixed terrestrial wireless (700kbs symmetric)
2013-2022: Fixed terrestrial wireless (11Mbs down/3kbs up)
2022-2025: Cable (300Mbps down/11Mbps up, upgraded to 400Mbps symmetric)
2025: FTTP (500Mbps symmetric)