Asianometry - 2026-08-02
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Watching this on ADSL
As am I for nearly 30 years.
I was told by a Verizon field technician less then a year ago that they are no longer offering ADSL to new landline telephone subscribers.
@SandBoxJohnhow much is your monthly bill?
How's your speed? 12mbps × 768 kbps is the best I was ever able to get on att, so I switched to cable.
me too!
@WarrenGarabrandt 12Mb is really good for DSL. I never got more than 7Mb and I know people that got just under 3Mb. One person said they get only slightly more than a 1Mb. DSL depends a lot of distance and also line conditions, and also noise on those lines.
Those T1 lines had a mythical status. Then ADSL/SDSL arrived and made those speeds accessible to anyone. It was that big of a deal.
But T3 was common by then, IIRC, so there was still that to fantasise about, while [totally legally] waiting for downloads and especially when uploading.
I never knew anyone with T1 in real life, but you would hear about godlike beings like John Carmack having one
@PutItAway101 Came here to say this. He had one going to house in the mid 1990s.
They were hahaha
I had T1 access in 1997 at my job working for Gateway Computers. I can say that based on My experience this was some of the fastest internet ever. Running on My Gateway Pentium 100 based machine!
ADSL technology has been pushed to the extreme in Germany, where 250Mbit VDSL (ADSL with vectoring, essentially pre-distorting signals at the DSLAM end so that the crosstalk distortion essentially un-distorts the signal at the customer end) is still a primary method of high-speed residential internet offered by Deutsche Telekom.
250M? Amazing! (For xDSL)
@Deividalfathat's not even the limit. GFast can push gigabit albeit on very short loops.
@Deividalfano not amazing! It’s the reason why we don’t have widespread fiber adoption.
And 250 is the absolute maximum. Usually it’s around 100, which mostly is ok, but not great
@Deividalfa EDIT: Oh I see what you meant now. Yeah for DSL, 250Mbps is amazing lol (Original comment below:)
If by "amazing" you mean "amazingly slow", you would be correct. 250Mbps is really bad in the modern era. These days I won't even consider an ISP if they don't offer gigabit internet--ideally via fiber--but fixed 5G home internet is decent second place option. Just make sure they don't scam you on upload speeds! Even today it's really difficult to find a provider that will give you at least a gigabit both ways. ISPs tend to throttle upload speeds to a pathetically slow 100Mbps or less, even with 2.5Gigabit download speeds! Do your research on what's available in your area before you pick a place to live!
@jonathanreichardt2270 I had ADSL 8Mbps in Poland countryside till may 2021, since then we have fiber optic symmetric 1Gbps/1Gbps for the same price (20€ per month)
"We may have forgotten it today, now that we have Fiber, 5G and Starlink"
I ASSURE YOU, US AUSTRALIANS STILL STUCK WITH IT, HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN IT.
Ah the good ol' NBN roll out.
I know it's important to make fun of the part of NBN that was a cash transfer of taxpayer money to Telstra, but is there any FTTP or FTTN customer that isn't encouraged to apply for FTTP conversion right now?
Much of Germany has it still too. In Finland old houses same..
Then you can join Stellantis
Stellantis, who are still building 2G-only emergency services into their vehicles in 2026, even though service will cease december 2027.
Oh, and not having a functioning auto-emergency call in your car when you car had auto-call at one point, is a fail on the annual check, so unless the EU makes a special exception, all Stellantis cars built after 2021 will be scrap metal in january 2028.
@radekc5325 "Your area is not yet being considered for FTTP,. Expected upgrades start November 2029." (previous time I checked it was "Late 2024"). 48MBit top speed until 2035 I guess
> many of us might have forgotten it today
Well - in Germany 60% of internet connections are DSL... I'm writing this via DSL.
Germany, the place where internet is forever Neuland.
All Quiet On The Fiber Front
At least I'm regularly visited by Telekom sales representatives, trying to sell me a fiber connection that might go into the ground as early as 5-10 years from now and that'll deliver the same internet speeds I currently have at just a 50% price increase
til, I thought everything was practically fiber nowadays
COAX stopped being a thing long ago, other than some legacy TV broadcasts
@carpenecopinum1665 What a deal 😂
South Africa went from a million ADSL users to just 20 000, mostly because the copper wires kept getting stolen, and no one steals the fiber.
They used to.
Until they stopped using armoured cables.
They used the Kevlar for rudimentary bullet proof jackets.
They steal it and try to sell it. It's when they get it to the scrap yard and try to sell it that they discover it's worthless. The phone company is usually still on the hook to fix it though.
And did they upgrade to fibre or there is just no internet?
@Tom-f8r8o Everything is fiber and 5G now. Even landline phones are over the fiber now.
@ajazvo No there are dodgy scrap yards that buy it, melt it, and sell it in china. They do it to the power cables too.
Every time I think you can't possibly come up with another interesting topic you come up with another interesting topic.
Internet over carrier pigeon.
The Chinese Hamster Revolutionized Medicine (a classic). Not a joke, excellent topic.
I remember ISDN! I Smell Dollars Now!
it still does nothing
@NotIdefix Bitch please. You know how many frags I got by being a LPB in Quake 2 because of my greasy smooth ISDN connection? The pwnage was unreal.
German: Is Sowas Denn Nötig? (Is this really necessary?)
@StefanReich ISDN, German tech, true
My family had the first babybell ADSL install in our area. I'd had it installed at my employer and knew what it could do, so I jumped at having it in my house the moment it was offered. The babybell rolled three trucks to do the install. One installer and a bunch of observers to learn, because none of them had done it before. It ended up not working the first day because they were using a bridged connection and couldn't get it provisioned. They did return the next day and got it working. It was quite a momentus day for that whole neighborhood. 25 years later, my current internet connection is 1000 times faster. The local phone company no longer even has cooper lines to homes.
simillar story here , as soon as ADSL was posible at my area i did everything a could to make it happen. In early 2000s internet was so bloody expensive in poland that you do not even imagine , people was paying huge amount of money for dial-up so the main provider in poland did not even wanted stable intenet connection , the money pay for stable net in poland back was was a cost of 20hurs of dial-up ! Everyting change when monopoly was breake down and sudenly they have someone to fight with for a client and first radio net showed up but i was still expensive as hell but still a loot cheper than dial-up and the monst important constant so people started to build local area network and split single internet connection between houses that forced provider to introduce ADSL finally but for first few years with data limints first 7GB then 32 and FINALL they took it off , they wanted to make ADSL for hours at the end but nobody wanted it :-D.
When my first ADSL arrived it did not work too for the first time :-D i had to wait a week to make it run.
I enjoyed this comment thank you
@przemyawukasik1745interesting that people made their own neighborhood networks bypassing the ISP. Romania had a similar history and it's got on average one of the highest bandwidth speeds to residential connections iirc.
Bureaucratic regulations gum up the system from newcomers shaking up the market here in the USA sadly.
Google had trouble putting out their Google fiber isp project because of it. Google, of all companies, had trouble. Think about that.
Same. Here it's all fiber and coax
@przemyawukasik1745wow nicee3
I remember when we finally got ADSL. It was a welcome improvement over dialup; especially in our tiny, rural town.
It was also immensely cheaper than dial-up or ISDN, it was the first time where a single payment gave you unlimited internet (at least where I lived we had very reasonable data limits, which are now a thing of the distance past).
this was the most amazing technology in the history of the internet. imagine achieving this using existing telephone infrastructure.
ADSL was huge in the UK where cable had relatively little coverage and telecoms were privatised in the 1980s in a way that encouraged tons of competition. It remains important today since fibre rollout has been fairly slow and 5G (and even 4G) coverage isn't great, so a lot of people still depend on it.
But was also the point you didn't have to pay per minute any more, besides NTLs 0800 service...
@tychothefriendlymonolith Telewest had the same free call service from around 1996, from memory.
I remember when we first got adsl on zen internet, I think it was 128/256k, it was amazing.
It still is, even in London many areas are stuck with the 76Mbps VDSL line from Vodafone/BT.
@Szergej33 Luxury! I can barely get 6 Mb/s. There is also no mobile signal, and no TV signal where I live.
This video brought back great memories of that transition from 28.8 to 56k dial-up models to DSL based internet! Nice Journey!
Yes
I still remember buffering a 3 minute video for 10 minutes just to watch a James Bond movie trailer. It was painfully slow but it was an exciting time to be able to access video over the internet.
Downloading a game, song or movie took all night 😂
In germany, fibre infrastructure is only slowly expanding because ADSL's improved version VDSL with max speeds around 250Mbit/s downstream and 40Mbit/s upstream, its still considered "good enough" by many households.When it comes to speed it really only struggles with high upload applications like cloud backups but fibres low latency and much improved stability are on another level!
If you're actually getting 250, the dslam is within a 2min walk.
In Australia, the longest copper line I saw was around 9km. The mean was around 3.
3 will get you about 10-15mbit.
Germany has certainly upgraded the location of the dslam probably at least twice. It's most likely feed by fibre.
The last cable into the house is the hardest to do.
Dealing with millions of homeowners and homes is much more complex than councils, poles, and pits.
i dont even have 16mbit down and 2 mbit up
GPON latency isn't that much better than VDSL2. About 2-4ms here. The stability of GPON is amazing tho.
They will do anything to cling to their copper lines, it's such a shame. We are left in the dust by our neighboring countries in regards of internet availability, cost, speed...
Not for long. I'd be interested in hearing whose hardware they're using. I don't know of anyone still making even VDSL chips. (ADSL has been dead for about 2 decades. 'tho VDSL chips can usually still do it.)
"Many of us might have forgotten it today, now that we have fibre [...]" - *cries in german*
East?
Here in Niedersachsen it's super common, even in the rural areas like where I live.
@GarethFairclough Maybe one of the greater cities? Besides that: I can not get fibre because the landlord does not want change to the historical building. But i have VDSL2 with vectoring so that i have exactly in this moment a possible bandwith of 274,9 Mbit/s. Which is fine for a single. Even as a datahoarder.
Why don't Germans like fibre?
Because the connection we have is fast enough and we don’t want to pay more for fiber.
@peterpaul9320but it's not, and Germany is falling behind.
A wonderful trip down memory lane. I worked for Alcatel on these projects through the whole crazy time. 🙂
I remember this was the first non-shit internet we got back in early 2000's.
The 2000 is/has/was or belonging/pertaining to the number 2000?
What?
@tim3172what?
in THE early 2000's
Now the transmission rates are amazing, delivering high-speed shitty content and social engineering via “oracles” of deception.
1 Mbps DSL was a revolution in 2000 Eastern Ontario.
I live in Montreal now and get both HFC and FTTH at 1 Gbit.
But I'll always love DSL.
I love DSL also, your Moms were the best 😂
I live in Eastern Ontario and when we finally got cable internet and I was able to talk on the phone at the same time, I remember thinking that feeling would never get old. So long ago now.
I worked for the adsl dept at Alcatel Bell. So I was used to seeing 8 mbit in the lab, in 1998. Then Belgacom started to offer ADSL and when they came with an ADSL modem in my home, i asked: 8 mbit? Dream on: 1 mbit. In 2003 I had 8 mbit rocket adsl via Evonet.
In my area west of Ottawa they rolled out the Nortel 1mbps modem first, later upgrading to Alcatel infrastructure.
@CrickelwoodI don't remember which he had. I think it was Nortel. We had Bell PPPoE software to connect until Windows XP came out.
Last time I was this early AOL was still dial-up.
NetZero has entered the chat
What does this format of joke actually means?
@Suspicious259 The OP has watched this video almost as soon as it came out and he made a joke comment just to let us know that. This particular one is just saying that he was so early to comment, AOL was still a pre-digital dial-up service. Since that would have been in the 90s sometime, it is silly af, but that's what jokes are.
I worked for a contractor for Cincinnati Bell in 1999-2000 and spent most of my time at customer homes installing and provisioning aDSL service. Used to go all over the Cinci area with a trunk full of 3C509 and 3C905 network cards since most PCs didn't even have an Ethernet port, and a whole back seat full of Cisco 625 modems. So much fun was had chasing down weird splices in phone lines, back and forth with the folks in the central offices, wedged up in crawl spaces and basements getting rid of weird filters and lightning arrestors that degraded the signal to the point that the modem couldn't even see the DSLAM let alone connect to it.
I still have my Scotchlock E9C tool from those days.
You sound just like the guy I’m looking for to trouble shoot my house.
@gragor11I'm a locksmith now but I still know my 568a from my 568b
Classic techi bio ... thanks, Dan!
Ah, 3com… so many companies passed by the wayside or merged in this space. The whole Alcatel discussion had me thinking “isn’t that lucent?”
ADSL was the jam man
I was selling ADSL connections in my country in 2006. Then in 2018 I was replacing the crappy routers provided by ISPs so people could actually get the fibre network speeds they paid for.
People in my country have so little knowledge of how things work, our ISPs don't even dial down users. They just give you a crappy router 😂
Only the brokies or people that lived in bfe had dsl when I was a teen.
1:55 Ugh I just felt my hair get greyer seeing that SuperStation
ADSL was a godsend over the old 56Kb modems. It was really useful in the file sharing days of the late 90’s and early aughts. Cable internet didn’t arrive until later even though we had cable for a long time prior to that.
When I built my rural home in 1990 I put in a 6 pair ISDN line to the node a distance of about 500m. I opted for ISDN data grade because my son was studying computer engineering. The cable was dragged in using a cable laying machine and is buried about 1m down. The premium cost was about $300 more than standard telephone line.
Around 1999 always on Internet became a thing and we upgraded our dialup service to VDSL. The performance was very good compared to dial up. We can easily stream video and get more than fast enough Web access for our needs.
About four years ago the line was hit by lightning, it took out the active line and the VDSL modem. It took a week to get an ISDN trained technician. Fortunately the redundant pairs were ok, the service switched to a redundant line and as new VHSADSL modem installed that substantially boosted service speef. The new modem includes a 4g data channel. The wireless link is only used if the ADSL service speed drops below the contracted service speed.
All in all other than the inconvenience around the lightning strike it's been a great service and in its new iteration still is.
A friend living in the coastal range had a lightning strike near the phone lines which fried the in-computer modem - luckily it didn't arc to anywhere else in the tower!
I'm glad this channel is getting established enough that its reach now enables collaboration with the people who helped build the technologies we get to learn about. Great stuff!
Recently landline phones have been completely phased out here in Finland, and with that all of the ADSL offerings too, press F to pay respects. That said, my 5G goes up to 400 Mbit/s so I don't really miss all kinds of copper internet, and in fact I'm not even bothering with cable.
F
0:29 this brings back memories to most people growing up in Belgium I bet ❤
In Sweden we got adsl about the same time as the cable companies started offering internet via the coax cables (2Mbit at the time). ADSL was mostly used by people who could not get cable-internet. We got cable-internet in the mid to late 90s I think and at the same time our neighbor got ADSL for their summer cabin.
The jump from 33kbps to 2Mbit was insane! ♥
I started using the Internet back in 1990. I started with a 1200 modem, and ended with a 56k, then DSL. Today I have a 5 gig fiber optic coming into my house. Amazing how tech has come .
When Mosaic became available, it really took off!
About the same here, we have FTTH but limited to 1Gb base service, or 2Gb premium service.
I bet they release 5 and 10 soon as our area is very sparsely populated and they installed massively overprovisioned trunks and backbone.
@Steevo69 In my area they have 5, and 10 gig available but I don't have any use for it. Here I am paying 65.00 for 2 gigs for one year, then 80.00 there after.
@NexivoStories I am content with the 1Gb, only when I am downloading remote backups off servers would I be able to use more speed, and thst is only obce a month for about 30 minutes.
@Steevo69 I am a Video Editor, and do a lot of Uploading, and downloading, so 2 gigs is what I need.
That explains why my internet provider gives me more download and less upload speeds.
What a great video. Recently retired, I spent nearly 50 years working in technology. When I was a youngster my parents had a party line POTS, and my aunt and uncle had a crank phone on a party line which at the time I thought was the coolest thing. I've been lucky enough to experience pretty much every advancement in copper technology during my lifetime. It's truly amazing how long compatibility with the POTS system has been maintained. About a year ago my copper line was changed out for 300mb/s fiber, and my analog phones are gone forever.
I actually got around 280 to on good days 290 MBIT/s trough Supervectoring 35b VDSL here in Germany where we honestly kept the technology far too long but it is really amazing how far you could push that technology.
Me, sitting here in great plains canada where the max our ISP offers us is 150mbit down, but that’s ok because my pc is connected to my router through the old phone lines I reterminated so it only gets 100 😂
In the UK ADSL was a game changer. Dial up was charged (by BT) per minute. There were some 0800 numbers or similar but for most people were charged per minute of internet access. When ADSL came it out it was a flat subscription with always on.
Same thing was here in Finland.
We got ISDN on east coast US around y2k, office was right next to the phone company, and a warehouse several miles away - the one call for support the engineer sounded very annoyed at having to deal with "the public" :))
i remember installing an ADSL splitter in my home in 1995, it was cheaper then the cost of two phone lines and well worth it. I was on call all the time so if my company couldn't call me i was in trouble. Later i paid for a second line with ADSL as well, for my teenage kids which made me quite the hero in my house!
When my family had ADSL service, we didn't have a splitter. We just had a filter to connect to the landline cordless phone we had.
Dear God, what blast from the past.
What are you talking about? Many households still use ADSL.
Had ISDN at my AT&T factory cubicle, with caller ID, in 88. Damn those phones were good.
I was quite early getting a decent ADSL connection. Now I can't wait for the upgrade to fibre that has been promised for years. ADSL always felt like a stop gap technology to me.
I worked for a few years at an ISP that provisioned ADSL, and still learned a lot of new things about it today. Thanks for the video.
I watch most your videos two times. The first time for falling asleep because its calm and peaceful and occupies my brain. And the second time the next day because I fell asleep after 3 minutes and I still want to watch the video 😅
ADSL is still often used combined with fiber where fiber goes up to the home but is then converted to ADSL over there.
I lived in Antwerp not far away from "den Bell". The popular name of building where back then Bell had a site. Btw the word "den" just "The" in Flemish (Dutch).
5:15 They did that by abusing their employees and customers. I was one of both.
This channel is pure gold! Thank you!
I remember disconnecting the Ethernet cable from my computer to the ADSL modem during a thunderstorm as at least one colleague got his motherboard fried through the phone line.
maybe so, but the old Western Electric phones had a massive inductor which could endure T-storm spikes
with no equipment losses, for decades
24:00 Cathode Ray Dude was working in the industry during that period and had a nice video describing this forgotten network collapse close call.
To be fair, to quote his statement, his job was mainly ripping copper out and replacing them with IP phone services, so he didn't interact with them directly, but that video when he talked about strange things on 90s US internet was trully amazing.
I haven't a DSL connection for almost 20 years! Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
@rarbiart - 2026-08-02
spotting my old Wikipedia images and 1990ies gear in an 2026 YT video makes me cheer...
@danaedward6726 - 2026-08-03
🎉
@BaldmanB - 2026-08-03
Here's a cookie 🍪
@Karl-from-slingblade - 2026-08-03
If you click the hot link it takes you to youtube videos about your spotting period. Good job 😂 dont get blood on ANYTHING
@TheAechBomb - 2026-08-03
@Karl-from-slingbladethat's only for you, the links arent the same for everybody. on my end, theres no hotlinks in this comment chain
@weir-doe3205 - 2026-08-03
@BaldmanBDoes it track or does it have Pecans in it?