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"What made you get connected to the 'net?"

I expect most of us couldn't imagine life without our Internet connection but what made you think 'I really need a connection to this Internet thing'

At the time I was a student and persuaded my folks to let me connect a modem to the phone line so I could e-mail myself work I was working on to my e-mail address at the sixth form college I was at so I didn't have to carry floppy disks around.

So what made you get connected?

BT is in somewhat of a unique position as its charged with maintaining the critical infrastructure and so it can say 'give us money or we won't do this that or the other' and the government will open the public purse/wallet and say 'how much do you want'

While I'm not for one moment suggesting any improper conduct of course I somehow don't think the Rt Hon Patricia Hewitt is a non-executive director for her knowledge of exchange equipment, routers or switches! (Source: BT corporate website)

Yep, and I'm sure Freeola wishes that it was far more open than 'open'reach currently is (I'm sure Tony would have something to say about it).

Still, I'm not holding out hope that anyone but BT (if that) will increase my internet speed any time soon and even if BT is the only option I'm not re-signing with them ever again.

Great minds think alike pb.

I suspect things would move a lot quicker if Openreach was mutually owned by the ISPs/telcos and run as a non profit for their benefit much like the peering exchanges in London, Leeds and Manchester.

Openreach/Wholesale is not independent as long as its a wholly owned subsidiary of BT Group PLC

The spin off was just to keep Ofcom happy, BT is still BT.

DL wrote:
That sounds 'quick' to me ... but perhaps Hmmm might enlighten us further.

Max speed I ever got on dial up was about 44 Kbps.

That sounds 'quick' to me ... but perhaps Hmmm might enlighten us further.

I still have the old RS-232 US Robotics V92 modem I used to use (not sure why I'm keeping it as last two PCs didn't have an RS-232 serial port) but a couple of weeks back I did have to use a dial up modem at work to test our network's external connectivity and the office test ADSL connection was down,

It was so slow it was painful,

screech, screech, dong, dong and then waiting for the page to load.

pb wrote:
One day the country will see sense and strip BT of their over-reaching powers and get other companies to lay their own cable at greater speed and over a decent amount of the country rather than just in the middle of towns.

With this I can agree :¬)

@Alfonse ... that's what I like and remember ... at the edge of technology ... two hard drives (total 11Gb), Rage II graphics card and then Voodoo3 16mb coupled with AMD K6-2 ... 'trifick stuff' and also the memories of trying to log into AOL with its 'golden' key logo....ouch painful!

The thing I love about modem internet is it was always regarded as slow and awful. I have great memories of sub-1gb hard-drives, Voodoo graphics cards, single core processors, but when I think about the noise and the lack of being able to use the phone and ridiculous wait times for downloading a single song I just want to cry

If I recall, when I first got the internet pictures like those would be in very low resolution and take about 6 months to download.

I first had experience of the internet at Uni with bulletin boards (Fortean Times) and decided it was good enough to install a 33.6k modem in the flat, though it proved pretty expensive being on there for too long.

That eventually turned in to 56k then 128k ISDN line. That line moved with me to my house and then eventually became broadband, which has slowly increased to the amazing current speed of just less than 3mbps. er...yey.

One day the country will see sense and strip BT of their over-reaching powers and get other companies to lay their own cable at greater speed and over a decent amount of the country rather than just in the middle of towns.

See ... even Alfonse agrees :¬)

Great calendars Alfonse