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On 16/06/10 18:21, Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Wed, 16 Jun 2010, Rob Beard wrote:On 16/06/10 16:53, Gordon Henderson wrote:Or a pair of baseband modems - you'll get 2Mb/sec or more - possibly even 8Mb if you have good twisted pair copper. (or multiple pairs)Are baseband modems those old looking boxes that BT used to use for Kilostream?Similar idea. BT had a few variants - bog-standard 64Kbps boxes which worked on dry copper - that was Kilonstream, or a channelised variant - Kilostream-N - to work with PSTN technology, so you got N channels of 64Kb/sec out of a 2Mb bearer - up to 30, when you had the option of taking the full 32 unchannelised (Megastream!) - depending on what you were after. (or could afford!) Telewest would do 128Kb/sec on dry copper if you asked them.
Ahh this brings back so many memories. When I worked at Exeter College (back in 1996/97) they had some remote sites connected via Kilostream and it was painfully slow (taking 5 to 10 minutes to load the Novell login application over the WAN). I guess that was easier than putting in a server back in those days though for something like 3 or 4 PCs. Luckily their second biggest site had it's own dedicated server and from what I remember 2Mbit fibre linking it to the main site and then 2Mbit fibre from the main site back to Exeter University and on to Super Janet.
There were the mainstay of the ISP business in the mid 90's. I was working for one then and we had kilostream & megastream lines going all over the country from our POPs in Bristol, London, B'Ham & Manchester...
Wow, they had copper going all that way?
BT at one point would supply dry copper pairs if you knew what to ask for - and there was a range of 2Mb baseband modems for these at the time - they're still avalable, but I doubt you can get a EPS8 or EPS9 line from BT anymore... (We managed to get one in Buckfastleigh 7 years ago though, and used a pair of expen$ive cisco baseband modems on it... Connected to the primary schools connection to SWGFL - the horrors :)
So I presume Kilostream and Megastream was the predecessor to ADSL, SDSL and Fibre?
Interesting stuff, I'll have to do a bit of reading up, I do enjoy reading up on this old technology, probably a bit sad and no doubt not much use these days but it keeps me out of trouble when the wife is out.
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html