Repo Man11 wrote on 2026-06-01, 17:24:
BitWrangler wrote on 2026-06-01, 02:39:
Getting a high fibre diet in the SW Ontario regions now, might encourage me to move further into the sticks.
https://swiftruralbroadband.ca/
I loved living miles out of town, surrounded by almond orchards, but man the internet access was grim. Dial up only, over very old phone lines to the max speed was only 26.4 k - there was never any need for a dial up modem faster than a 28.8 as that was faster than the best possible connection. I lived with that for years, then finally spent the money for satellite internet. That was expensive while still being slow, but it was better than dial up. Then came a wireless internet service that was initially very good, but then they oversold it (ugh, Netflix) and trees grew up and choked off the line of sight signal.
My mother didn't know how good she had it. She also lived in the countryside, but she was near where the phone service hub was located, and as a result she had the fastest dial up speeds I've ever seen. It would consistently connect at 48 k, and seemed more like DSL than dial up compared to what I was used to.
This is how things were for me growing up as well. We lived in the woods outside of a small town ~100-150 miles from any decently sized city that anyone has ever heard of.
We had dial-up that would connect at 24.6k usually... but sometimes, on a good day, it would connect at 26.4k. I remember downloading most files at around 1KB-2KB per second, with the rare "fast" connections getting up to 3KB\sec. So, a 1MB download usually took anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes. Getright download manager and other things like it were absolutely required for anything that was more than a few MB in size because it was likely that the download would need to be paused and resumed later due to getting disconnected or having to disconnect the line to use the phone (we had two lines but one was being used frequently by another family member who needed it, so I had to steal the main telephone line to connect my PC to the internet in the evenings).
We dealt with this until ~2001-2002(?) when the local cable company finally provided broadband. The first cable internet package we had was, I believe, 768k down and 128k up. It was like traveling to another planet it felt so fast. Nothing was ever the same after that.
Still... having dial-up in our house was better than having to drive to a relative's house with a pile of floppy disks so we could download things, save them to disks and then bring them back home to find out if they worked or not.
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.
