I have used Earthlink DSL for nearly four years, but today I cancelled the service. As mentioned in a previous post, Verizon has a sexy new service called FiOS. It was finally enough to tempt me to switch.
I got the cheapest and slowest FiOS internet service. Assuming that taxes and fees will be a wash, FiOS will cost me $10 less each month than I was paying with Earthlink. And now that I've done a few largish downloads I can report that FiOS is about 7 times faster than what Earthlink was able to deliver. Those are numbers I can't ignore.
But as I leave Earthlink I have to commend them for a solid service. In the four years I was with them I had very few outages. Like maybe one per year, with nothing lasting longer than a couple of hours. And the performance was consistent. There were no daily slowdowns when the kids got home from school. There were no seasonal slowdowns. Even the Victoria's Secret online fashion show didn't slow down my other internet use.
And, it must be noted, I came to Earthlink from ISDN, where I was paying about $1500 per month for 128 kilobits per second (both ways). So $50 per month for 768 kilobits down and 256 kilobits up was a real deal! FiOS is the next step. I wonder what the future will bring.
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I don't recall what I paid for My First Modem, but I do recall the brand: US Robotics. The year : circa 1980. The computer : a TRS-80 Model III (Roman numerals makes anything all-the-more special).
I wasn't about to pay $550 (or whatever) for a Real Hayes Modem and the USR served me proudly for many years. After all (to pseudo-paraphrase Bill Gates), what would anyone need with more than 300 baud?
BTW, never ever confuse "baud" with "bits per second". As if!
What will the future bring? I'm going out on a limb here, but .. faster and cheaper?
Thanks for the nostalgia, Gene Bob.
I do remember that early modems used only two tones: one tone represented zero and the other represented one. Baud had to do with how many tones were transmitted per second, and for these early modems it equaled bits per second. But unless I'm mistaken, the 1200 bit per second modems used more than two tones, though I seem to recall them still be marketed as 1200 baud. Maybe you can dig up something more hysterically accurate.
What will the future bring? I think faster is clearly on the horizon, but I'm not sure about the cheaper part, at least in absolute terms.
Going from ISDN to aDSL had a very dramatic price drop ($1500 to $50 -- a ratio of 30 to 1) along with an impressive, but not nearly as overwhelming, increase in speed (only a 6-fold increase in speed).
Going from aDSL to FiOS gave me a similar increase in speed as the previous transition, but only reduced cost by 20%.
Even if we consider the price of the cheapest dial-up to be the pricing floor, that is only a 4 to 1 drop from today's FiOS charge. I guess a free (advertizing supported?) ISP offering would represent an infinite ratio :-), but those seem to be out of favor right now.
So I'll buy faster, but I doubt that we'll get much cheaper.
am surprised you didn't explore the alphabet soup re: fibre/fiber communications:
FC; FC-AL; FC-PH; FC-SW; FCIP; FCP; FCVI; FOC; FOIRL; FON, FTTC; FTTH; iFCP; MFCP (not to mention SCSI-FCP)
in the baud-vs-bps query, why should I answer, when Google'ing is easier:
baud versus bps
reading the dictionary.com blog, and noted
"digerati: persons knowledgeable about computers"
does this mean I should consider William Bob to be a "member of the digerati"?
The dictionary.com entry didn't go far enough. Being a member of the digerati also implies that you get your carnal satisfaction digitally.
hrdjof.
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