Your First Adsl Memories

MEG101 said:
I had the R7 infinite call package with Telkom that cost R49 per month apart from the Telkom line rental. ISP dial up costs was R79 per month and if I were lucky I got 40kbps that I used for downloading music, chatting, web surfing etc. I connected 8pm Friday and disconnected 6am om Monday morning and if I managed to use 2GB for weekend it was a lot. Later I got ISDN at 64kbps per channel and if you used the two channels you got 128kbps - that was insanely fast for that time. ISDN was dedicated 64 of 128kbps internet - it felt like heaven!! It all cost me R1000 plus p/m. The internet cost a pretty penny back in those days - with all the dial up stuff and caps and top ups - if you forgot the dial up on in peak hours - you could easily ran a bill of R250 for that one call.

Later I got 192kbps ADSL with a 3GB cap - that was more than enough, I even struggled to use it all up. Line speeds were upgraded to 384kbps to 512kbps to 1mbps to 2mbps to 4mbps - all with 20 to 100GB caps respectively. Later I had 4mbps uncapped - that was heaven for sure - but "uncapped" meant 400GB PUF.

Today we have a 20mbps VDSL Line that is uncapped - this is the fastest we can get - no Fiber as of yet available. Hopefully soon we will have Fiber internet - cannot wait!!
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ISDN :eek: :eek: forgot about that...
 
got my first job applied mweb 512kps uncapped as soon the paycheck landed.

I could host dota games because of 256kps upload, I was quite popular because of that lol
 
Gtx Gaming said:
got my first job applied mweb 512kps uncapped as soon the paycheck landed.

I could host dota games because of 256kps upload, I was quite popular because of that lol
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Haha yeah that would make sense.
Scary to see where we've come from, I mean 512kps was what I had in 2008/2009 as it was an upgrade from my 384kbs. In 2008 I went to my brothers place in London and he had 20mbps and we could watch Youtube without buffering it was like woah.
 
nad_isa said:
ISDN :eek: :eek: forgot about that...
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Who remembers the analogue leased lines you could get? It was like a cheaper version of the Diginet leased lines, except it used an analogue modem running at 56k. It was slow, but it was permanently on. It was basically a point-to-point analogue line between yourself and the POP of your ISP. At the time it was the cheapest always-on method of internet connectivity you could get, but it still cost a few thousand rand a month.
 
My earliest memories is mwebs BIG BLACK BOX special. 56k Duxbury modem dial-up.
 
Was a kid when we got ADSL, was a 512Kbps I think, or whatever the highest tier was, my dad's company paid for it at the time.
Basically I could finally play RuneScape without setting a timer and worrying that it would use too much data, lol.

Got stuck on that speed till I think 4Mbps was released, where we jumped to 2Mbps, then to 4Mbps as technicians said our line couldn't handle. Then we jumped a few months later to 10Mbps, tried to go for 20Mbps, but line couldn't handle so only had unstable 16Mbps, that dropped to 10Mbps and then over the years started degrading to around 8Mbps.

Once fiber came along a few years ago, went straight for 100/50Mbps OpenServe for a few months (think 14 months), then moved to frogfoot 100/100Mbps on Cool Ideas, left them 6 months later as they couldn't sort out line issues, and then moved to Atomic Access about May last year I think it was, which includes the window for 200/200Mbps upgrades.

Might end up upgrading to 200/200Mbps permanently if family member's company keeps paying for internet for a while longer (during lockdown they've agreed to pay for it), as installation cost piece falls away so 200/200 would fall within allowance.
 
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Like most, I started with 56K back in 1998 until 2006 via iAfrica.com as ISP. During this period I mainly used it to download songs via Napster and play vintage Counter-Strike 1.5 (the retail and or mod edition which ran via the WON.net service before Steam became a thing) along with my friend online. My friend and I used to play a lot on the 56K Dahshur server with a sweet 250ms ping. I remember him downloading the game patches for CS over the weekend using the R7 plan and bringing me the patches the following week, lol!

Fast forward to the end of 2006, my parents finally ordered ADSL for us as I completed my studies at the end of 2006. I remember each day switching on my router to see if the DSL light would stop blinking as there wasn't any ports available on my exchange at that time. Think after 2-3 weeks of waiting the light finally stopped blinking and my 384k (slowest line available at that time) was ALIVE!

I remember that I had one 3GB capped account with Cybersmart and one 30GB local only IS capped account that I used in conjunction with the legendary Route Sentry program. My first online gaming experience was with Battlefield 2142 and boy, I cranked that game in the evening that December holiday till March the next year for 432 hours. Made a lot of online friends which I'll never forget, loved my Airtransport ship and gave a lot of the BFC clan members lifts to the Titan ships, good good times!

Before the end of each month, I would ensure that I always downloaded my 33GB via the IS news servers and international downloads. In 2010, I got a full time appointment and upgraded to a 4MB ADSL line immediately. The 4MB eventually became a 10mb (12 mb line) which I used until November 2015 before I got fibre in my neighborhood :D
 
When we first got ADSL (I was 12), for me the novelty was being able to use the internet 24/7, instead of having to wait for 7pm on a Friday night. Telkom Internet, 384k, 2gb softcap.

For me dial up consisted of connecting at 7pm on a Friday night. Queue some downloads (mostly music on Limewire) and go to sleep at 9pm... then waking up at 4am and spend the whole Saturday on the internet. Skip breakfast and lunch cause every second online matters... repeat Sunday.... usually realise Monday morning I never did my weekend homework, oops.


But yeah, ADSL was pretty great. Used it till 2018 with a 10mbps line that worked really well... except the copper started getting stolen every second week, Telkom stopped replacing it, and now we're stuck with LTE, which is really disgusting on our highly congested towers.

A fibre company approved our area for fibre a few weeks ago. Just need the municipality to approve wayleaves then we'll be live in 6 weeks. Gimme that 100mbps!
 
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Only got ADSL when I started working and moving to Kempton(2011). 4MB ADSL Ah the feeling of no longer using Vodacom 3G data and a 500MB limit. CoD sitting at a few MS ping and their network usually picked my PC as host.....was a good time
 
hahaha, yeah 56k dial up and R7 weekends.
First professional job allowed me to get 384k ADSL with 1GB cap.
Somehow, that was enough!
Eventually bumped that to 10mb uncapped. ( felt very first world... )
Then when fibre arrived I moved to 10mb uncapped.
At the time, I'd have stuck with ADSL, I had no problems with it. The issue was Telkoms crazy prices/ non naked ADSL option.
And soon, just like dial up, ADSL will go bye bye too (the process is already happening)
 
gregmcc said:
R7 a weekend was great. Used to have a script that dialed up at 7:01PM Fri and dropped 6:59AM Mon.

Anyone that picked the phone up during weekend got a shouting :)
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The problem for me was during the week. I remember my parents getting super angry because their Telkom bill was like R1500 some months because I would sit on the dial-up for hours, and that was a lot of money in the late nineties. And they always made me pay it back! Also, remember how households that were lucky enough to own a computer only had 1 computer that everyone shared.
 
deweyzeph said:
The problem for me was during the week. I remember my parents getting super angry because their Telkom bill was like R1500 some months because I would sit on the dial-up for hours, and that was a lot of money in the late nineties. And they always made me pay it back! Also, remember how households that were lucky enough to own a computer only had 1 computer that everyone shared.
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From about 1994 there was a computer in my room, from when I started working at 16 I got dial up on Mwebs big black box with that black 56k modem in about 98, lighting took that modem out, to the extent that it melted
 
Lupus said:
From about 1994 there was a computer in my room, from when I started working at 16 I got dial up on Mwebs big black box with that black 56k modem in about 98, lighting took that modem out, to the extent that it melted
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LOL, lightening used to eat these.
1596130227989.png
We always had a spare
 
nad_isa said:
So I did have dial up when I was a kid. I'm from Cpt, and I remember when the lines were slow I'd enter in a JHB number for dial in and get crapped out by the parents when the itemised bill came by post at month end lol

Anyway as per the the thread I'm looking for your first adsl memories..

Mine was a Nashua 384kbps line on contract with a 1gig cap o_O modem was network locked lol... cant remember but dont think it had wifi..
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We had the M-Web black box with the 7 rand deal where as long as you could stay online it would only cost 7 rand (though in those days 7 rand was a lot). Unfortunately if anyone wanted to use the phone it would cut you off, restart and cost another 7 rand the next time you went on. Still remember those pictures loading... looked like one of those pens that you turn upside-down but in slow motion...

ADSL wise, went straight for a 512kbps uncapped connection, downloaded 24/7 as much music as I could and then cancelled. After listening to all my new tunes I started another cycle. It was way cheaper to rent a DVD in those days so you would be wasting cash on downloading movies...
 
There was a kid in my neighborhood who's dad worked for Microsoft back in the mid 90s, they had like a 28/36k modem with dial back from Microsoft, helped us learn quiet a bit about computers back then, towards the end of the decade the internet started getting more popular and my best friend was one of the first I knew to get connected. When I started working in the early 2000's got myself ISDN and the R7 Telkom Deal, best friend had the same and we setup a network between our houses to share content. Great times for growth and learning in the 90s and 2Ks when all you had was books from CNA and an internet that you had to 'teach'.

ADSL took ages to reach my hometown, we had to go down the iBurst route with roof mounted directional antenna, but some might say there was some sort of way of possibly getting unlimited data with em which made it way cheaper than ADSL in those days
 
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