Why 56k Modems Relied on Digital Phone Lines You Didn't Know We Had

Re:Why 56k Modems Relied on Digital Phone Lines You Didn't K... by Suppafly on Monday March 10, 2025 @02:03PM (#43323494)

>I know that between around '93 and '97 if you dialed AOL from D/FW there was a good chance your call would be terminated somewhere within a mile or two of your house and the bits flowing between your Compaq Presario and AOL would be sent digitally from the local CO to AOL's data center in Sterling, VA.

Around the end of the dialup era, I noticed a bunch of similar low cost dialup services all used the same phone numbers, is this part of the reason, or were they all just reselling the same internet access or something?

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Re:Why 56k Modems Relied on Digital Phone Lines You Didn't K... by zinekeller on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @02:27AM (#43329715)

Not GP, but this reminds me of how modern GPON (including XGS-, 50G-) works in some areas, like NBN (Australia), NTT FLETS (Japan) and Openreach (UK) where the fiber runs, on what is essentially, a PPPoE or IPoE pipe that tunnels the connection from the customer to the real ISP the user subscribed. Switzerland (basing at least on Init7 docs) has somehow decided on fiber-optic being a real dumb pipe, which is really nice but I imagine that it is costly.

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