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Old 16th Oct 2019, 9:31 pm   #13
G6Tanuki
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Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Wiltshire, UK.
Posts: 13,953
Default Re: Dial-up bulletin boards

One thing to remember in the context of classic dialup-BBS is that in the mid-to-late-90s the phone-companies switched their infrastructure to one where they digitized your legacy voice-calls at the nearest-to-the-user point.

Also, because the Internet-world caught them unawares - with the demand for 'second line' phones [so you coult talk and surf at the same time] the likes of BT rolled-out kludges like "DACS" [which was a sort-of hybrid pseudo-audio-piggybacked-on-ISDN2+] to handle this.

Proper ISPs were provisioned with head-end dialup infrastructure that didn't bother to convert the digitized-streams from their customers back to audio before reconverting it to digital in their modems - instead they got 'unstructured' incoming feeds and fed them into what were known back them as "Not-modems" - all part of delivering "56K" downloads.

This evolving telco infrastructure was a real pain for legacy customers who used faxes! - and didn't generally play well with the smaller BBS-operators either - they were reluctant to spend significant money buying infrastructure and points-of-presence for theirt customers [who were generally not prepared to pay for their services either].

I'd guess that these days all the telcos digitize their legacy voice-traffic as close to their customer-end infrastructure as possible.

Which could cause issues with anyone trying to use old-style 300/600/1200/2499 modems.

Last edited by G6Tanuki; 16th Oct 2019 at 9:54 pm.
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