Re: Serial Port: YouTube over Dialup
By: Warpslide to All on Sat Sep 27 2025 18:05:22

Hi, Warpslide.

The Serial Port decided to see if it was possible to stream a YouTube video over a dialup connection.

I really enjoy Serial Port's stuff. As a networking nerd a lot of it is quite close to my heart. I watched the Cabletron video just today - I remember Cabletron FDDI switches from the first proper networks job I had.

"Remember" may be over-stating it a bit, the only thing I really remember is that they could show an ASCII-art diagram of the FDDI dual ring to help you identify if it was healthy, looped (i.e. the ring was incomplete and being 'repaired' by one of the switches) or crossed (i.e. the inner ring and outer ring were joined due to a cabling error).

I assumed his stuff was quite niche but actually the channel has 10s of thousands of followers. Maybe other people like his server stuff?

BobW
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Re: Re: Serial Port: YouTube over Dialup
By: phigan to paulie420 on Tue Sep 30 2025 10:42:30

Hi, Phigan.

It was definitely a thing, and people did it with ISDN and other types of lines, too... but the ISP had to be set up to support it.

Yeah, link bonding works well if you know all of your connections land on the same device at the head end, less so if you are dialing a virtual number and hitting random devices all over the place.

I'm pretty sure you can work around that using L2TP - though multilink falls apart a bit if you have significantly different delay on the member links.

BobW
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Bob Worm wrote to phigan <=-

It was definitely a thing, and people did it with ISDN and other types of lines, too... but the ISP had to be set up to support it.

Yeah, link bonding works well if you know all of your connections land
on the same device at the head end, less so if you are dialing a
virtual number and hitting random devices all over the place.

The ISDN era was fun, it was like having 2 smart phone lines. I had one
going into the BBS, the other end connected to a Shiva LANRover at
work. I could take calls on the first B channel, have them hunt to the
second channel to take two callers, or nail both channels up to the LAN
Rover to get 112kb/sec of internet goodness. I'd also discovered FTN
via FTP, and could poll several times a day instead of dialing up to my
local hub once a day.

The "two callers" thing was purely academic - at that point I was
getting one call a day. :(


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Re: Re: Serial Port: YouTube over Dialup
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Bob Worm on Fri Oct 17 2025 07:50:14

Hi, pF.

nail both channels up to the LAN
Rover to get 112kb/sec of internet goodness.

Heh, that's weird. I know T1 circuits over there are / were smaller than E1 over here (1.544 Mbps vs 2Mbps) but I thought that was because you have 24 x 64k channels in a T1 as opposed to 30 x 64k in an E1.

Was / is ISDN only 56k on basic rate connections in North America or was that a limitation of the LAN Rover?

BobW
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Re: Re: Serial Port: YouTube over Dialup
By: Bob Worm to poindexter FORTRAN on Fri Oct 17 2025 10:15 pm

Heh, that's weird. I know T1 circuits over there are / were smaller than E1 over here (1.544 Mbps vs 2Mbps) but I thought that was because you have 24 x 64k channels in a T1 as opposed to 30 x 64k in an E1.

European E1 did have 30 channels. I got my circuits crossed (ahem...) straight T1 gave you 24 56kb/channel, using robbed-bit signalling.

ISDN here was 2x64kb/1x8kb, but when you hooked up a 56k modem, you'd have a pretty good chance of getting a fast connect, because your half of the circuit was all digital. I got lots of 56K and 53K connects running that way.

Never got an ISDN to ISDN connection, that would have been cool.
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Re: Re: Serial Port: YouTube over Dialup
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Bob Worm on Fri Oct 17 2025 16:52:51

Hi, pF.

European E1 did have 30 channels. I got my circuits crossed (ahem...) straight T1 gave you 24 56kb/channel, using robbed-bit signalling.

The worst of both worlds, if you like :) That's interesting, because over here if you used an E1 for primary rate ISDN you got 30x64K plus separate signalling, it was often called "an ISDN 30". How does it work if you use a T1 for terminating ISDN calls (assuming you can / could)?

ISDN here was 2x64kb/1x8kb, but when you hooked up a 56k modem, you'd have a pretty good chance of getting a fast connect, because your half of the circuit was all digital. I got lots of 56K and 53K connects running that way.

Now this is the bit I never got to play with but I understood that getting dial up to connect above 33k6 required ISDN at the provider end. I guess they'd only let you signal up a voice call, though, not data so you couldn't get ISDN end-to-end.

ISDN was great back in the day. I wish they'd rolled it out in place of dial up over POTS. Instead what we got was "Home Highway" which was residential ISDN, marketed as "midband". That went precisely as far as you'd imagine when most people could get ADSL at that time.

BobW
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Re: Re: Serial Port: YouTube over Dialup
By: Bob Worm to poindexter FORTRAN on Sat Oct 18 2025 07:32 pm

The worst of both worlds, if you like :) That's interesting, because over here if you used an E1 for primary rate ISDN you got 30x64K plus separate signalling, it was often called "an ISDN 30". How does it work if you use a T1 for terminating ISDN calls (assuming you can / could)?

You could - ISDN Primary Rate Interface was 23 64K channels plus a 8k D channel. we used Ascend Pipeline routers that'd bring in a PRI on one side and accept connections from users with BRI lines on available channels - then route them to our network.
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Re: Re: Serial Port: YouTube over Dialup
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Bob Worm on Sat Oct 18 2025 15:12:30

Hi, pF.

You could - ISDN Primary Rate Interface was 23 64K channels plus a 8k D channel. we used Ascend Pipeline routers that'd bring in a PRI on one side and accept connections from users with BRI lines on available channels - then route them to our network.

Thanks for the explanation - every day's a school day and it's always more interesting to get a real life answer than to look it up on Wikipedia (no offence to Wikipedia, I love that site).

I'm surprised the PRI's D channel was only 8k - seems like having the same size D channel for a BRI with two bearers vs. 23 would be a bit generous. My memory has disappeared down the time tunnel a bit but I thought European PRI were 30 x 64k B channels + 2 x 64k D channels to make it up to 2048k. Maybe you need to lose some for framing *shrug*. Come to think of it, I could have sworn BRI had a 16k D channel?

I met up with some of the (other) old fogies from my time in Alcatel-Lucent the other week, maybe the next time I see them I'll bring up TDM and watch their eyes light up...

BobW
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