Video: Five Phone Stories (Finished!)
Added 2025-03-14 23:37:08 +0000 UTCAlright, this is the finished version. Thank you so much to everyone who chimed in on the video and the patreon post, you caught a LOT of mistakes - I don't think any were major, per se, but several were embarrassing and I should have known better / checked better. I am pretty happy with the outcome, though I admit there's a lot of onscreen text - this is such a dense topic that there were things I just could not fit into the script that still needed to be mentioned, didn't know what else to do. Enjoy!
Comments
You bring up "ISDN was never used" a lot in your videos, and while this is true for the US, in Germany and Austria it was a very common thing. At the end, Germany had 13 million deployed ISDN lines. Analog telephony lines into the home are also very uncommon in Europe these days, usually you get either DSL/Fiber from your TelCo, and the box is a FritzBox which provides you with one S0 ISDN and two Analog connections, which in turn connect to SIP servers of either the TelCo or whatever you set them up with, or you have internet via Cable, and the same thing applies.
Stefan Szomraky
2025-05-05 07:24:57 +0000 UTCI thought StackExchange style question boards are a recent thing, not literally the oldest thing on the internet
Antonne
2025-03-20 13:38:21 +0000 UTCIn the UK, I got ISDN as soon as BT offered a home ISDN service (about 1999). It was called BT Home Highway and offered a wall box with 2 analogue and 2 digital lines, of which you could have any 2 connected at any one time. The latency improvement was huge and that was the main benefit really. The cost was £40 per month and that included £14 of calls. In '99, we also had a service called BT Surftime. This was an add-on cost that allowed you to dial your ISP for free for a fixed cost of £20 per month. An extra £20 per month gave the ISP access and therefore for £80 per month in 1999 you could get an unlimited ISDN service at 64kbps to a UK ISP without tying up the voice line. Only had ISDN for 2 years and then switched to ADSL at 512/256 and never looked back.
John Terry
2025-03-19 21:17:49 +0000 UTCDo you want to know more about the leased line services and how they were transmitted cross country? More about the telephony side? A detour to the weird way the UK handled the capacity problems? What leased lines were used for? What those extra slots on the back of a portmaster 3 are for? The actual practical differences between a BRI and a PRI? The way you could get PRI that was actually bigger than a single T1 or E1? Why 56k modems were often kinda pants in the USA because of robbed bit signalling? The real reason why you'd never actually be able to use huge numbers of BRI bonded into a PRI to full effectiveness? The wonder of PoS links? There's so much here!
Nene
2025-03-19 03:12:51 +0000 UTCTell us all! That sounds fascinating. I used to collect dual socket 370 motherboards and the P3 Tualatin CPUs for them, so I could set up a Beowulf cluster. I wanted to go back in time to 1994 so I could open my own ISP using my collection and offer crazy speeds with my trash from the future. Why yes, I was totally an adult.
Dante Blando
2025-03-18 22:12:57 +0000 UTCFor security (fire, intrusion monitoring etc) applications using dry loops & leases line service, search for a product called DVACS, which was provided by a company called “Electro Arts Ltd” (not that one). I still have a bunch of their F1/F2 interface boxes which used to plug directly into the alarm company receivers. Pure caveman tech. A gentle step up from soup-cans on copper wire with 48v across it.
Nageeb
2025-03-18 08:20:33 +0000 UTCOh, that's *entirely* an artifact of me being Technical, heh. When I was first introduced to ADSL, it was via my dad bringing home a binder containing a whitepaper on the technology. Our modem was a (dreadful) Alcatel 1000 that I believe said ADSL right on it, because it was really intended for commercial use. And at that point I was committed to saying it forever, but you're absolutely correct that that term was almost *never* used in marketing or PR.
Cathode Ray Dude
2025-03-18 04:27:30 +0000 UTCOh boy, I lived this in the late 90s and 00s, and there is so much more to this than you know! I worked dial up ISPs of various sizes right until the bitter end of dial up, and past it to be honest. I'd love to fill in the gaps for you.
Nene
2025-03-18 04:05:50 +0000 UTCI guess I was about 7 years old when 56k dialup became a thing. Honestly, I don't remember what the internet speed was like before that, but it became pretty ubiquitous very fast. In the Detroit area, we didn't even have broadband available until 2000 at the earliest, I first knew people who signed up around 2001 and we got cable in 2002. DSL wasn't really that popular around here. And by 2002, every ISP was advertising as "X times faster than dialup", which I presume is basing that on 56k, or so I thought. Hmm Also we bought a Dell Dimension desktop in 2000 (came with everybody's favorite OS, Windows ME) and I'm pretty sure it had a 56k modem built in Edit: also by the mid 2000s, my grandparents in rural Ohio had DSL service - cable wasn't available there, they used satellite for TV - so it had definitely caught on even in BFE by that point. Edit 2: So I notice you keep saying ADSL and the filter device even says ADSL on it. I know that's the technical name for what non-business internet service offered, but at least colloquially, everybody just called it DSL. I had never heard the term ADSL until talking to European friends who had always called it that. Huh. Wonder if the ISPs thought less letters was better.
Danny Forche
2025-03-17 21:05:35 +0000 UTCOkay, so now I'm to the part where you were talking how unless a telco could prove offering [service] would bankrupt them, they had to provide it. This hits home for me and an ongoing feud I had with my ISP for months before I eventually gave them the middle finger and bought my own VOIP gear. Long story short - my parents still have a landline. They want one and use Panasonic cordless phones in the house. Boomer stuff. Back in like 2011, AT&T started having issues with noise and static on the line, and additionally it was costing them something like $60 a month just to keep the line connected. I suggested bundling it with the ISP, because they offered phone service (VOIP based of course) for about half of that. So we switched - the ISP did all the grunt work of moving the main telephone line from the basement closet up to where our modem is, and plugged it in. I didn't mind using a rental modem when DOCSIS 2.0 was the standard, because those didn't have routers built in yet and it meant I could use my own purchased equipment. Well, several years later we got a speed upgrade. It was now using DOCSIS3, and the only modem they provided us with had a built in wireless router, which F'ed up my NAT. Yes you can put it in bridge mode, and I did, but every time the power went out it would reset and F up my NAT again. So I called them and asked, do you have any DOCSIS3 rental modems without a router built in? I own my own router and don't want yours. They said yes, but those didn't have a telephone port, so I'd have to cancel the phone service with them if I wanted to go that route. So I asked, what if I just buy my own modem? I can activate it, right? And they said sure, for internet only, but for telephone service you have to use their rental modem. They claimed it had something to do with 911 regulations. I researched it and found that was completely BS and that the FCC *required* all ISPs to allow you to use your own equipment as long as it met the technical specifications of their network. So I did more research. I found out what modems they rent to customers (of course it was just ARRIS, why wouldn't it be?) and found a telephony model with no modem. Bought it on eBay, and scheduled a tech. The tech comes out, I explain this all to him, he goes "yeah it should work fine, we used to use those same ones before we got rid of them all and got the kind with a built in wireless router" and he tries to call his supervisor at the office to whitelist the MAC address. We get to the telephone part, and they're like "wait, uh, no, you can't... customers can't use their own equipment for phone. That's our policy." The guy puts me on speaker and I start screaming at them about FCC rules and how the tech even told me that exact model of modem will work, and the supervisor isn't budging. I ranted about this on Reddit quite a bit back when it happened. Tech had to go home and leave the modem+router rental model hooked up, sad trombone noises ensued. Shortly after that I just got myself an OBIHAI and ported my number to Google Voice, getting free VOIP service and cancelled their $30/month phone offering. So yeah... this is still a problem and it seems like ISPs and telcos just DO NOT CARE whether it's legal or not, they just do what they want and bribe the FCC to not enforce their own rules. Had I really felt feisty I could have threatened to sue the ISP, but it ended up saving us money in the long run because Google Voice is free, haha. I ended up moving it to voip.ms since then, because ObiTalk ended the partnership with Google, but yeah. It's like pennies on the dollar and my parents can still use their old phones.
Danny Forche
2025-03-17 20:03:25 +0000 UTCWatching this now. When you mentioned how PRI ISDN was an updated version of T1 - would it surprise you to learn that people shockingly still use T1? I got called to a site in rural Ohio whos T1 modem failed (my company sold it to them) - met the phone company tech on site and everything. I asked him, who's still using T1 in 2022 [or 2023, whenever it was I went down there] and he said a lot of businesses still use it for LAN purposes. This small soybean plant did actually have a fiber connection for web browsing. But they used a T1 line for LAN, since it was just a tiny office with no infrastructure, and they were logging into Active Directory servers elsewhere in the country. I guess there's no need for a VPN if you're using T1... So the result was they had internet and could surf the web but couldn't logon to their PCs or print stuff to the printer sitting 6 feet from them, because the T1 connection had died. Oy.
Danny Forche
2025-03-17 19:43:46 +0000 UTCLovely video, thank you
qdoggie
2025-03-17 19:31:44 +0000 UTCif you use IRC, #retronetworking on libera.chat is full of people who might be interested in that, and a lot of them are based in de
felixphew
2025-03-16 03:24:13 +0000 UTCQuieres?
EASY TARGET
2025-03-15 10:50:48 +0000 UTCon a side note: i might have a full rack of Spirent DSL stuff (including some line length/noise simulators and a Cisco Catalyst 6500) from the 00ies for pickup in northern germany, in case a "retroproviding" enthusiast will give it a good home. (i just hope for a better fate than the ISDN G4 fax i gave a way a few years ago, it did not receive much care at the new place.)
adorfer
2025-03-15 08:09:55 +0000 UTCseconding this! ❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹
tellumo
2025-03-15 03:17:31 +0000 UTCDon't worry about it we love you regardless 😘
John Hamblett
2025-03-15 02:07:21 +0000 UTCAlso forgot to mention, wishing you the best with health stuffs! 🤗
Zen The Fox
2025-03-15 00:37:48 +0000 UTCCool AF thumbnail!!! Absolutely loved the early cut so can't wait to watch the finished one!
Zen The Fox
2025-03-15 00:36:17 +0000 UTCTalking about the behind-the-scenes look at ISP operators, nowadays there's NANOG with public mailing lists https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/
Dennis Henderson
2025-03-15 00:31:49 +0000 UTCThumbnail fucking rocks on this one
Xaviette Katzenfrau
2025-03-14 23:52:43 +0000 UTC
