CADVision Internet 1990s, how much bandwidth did all of Calgary use? (estimate game)

[thetransporter]

We were talking about this the other day

Today people have 100mb, even 150mb, internet
Dial up was 14-56kbps

Did the ISP need just a 50mb (is that 50000?) internet connection or something like that to serve the city?

rage2 may know best


its just amazing how we used dial up and within 2 years mobile data was faster than dial up

[BigMass]

Originally posted by thetransporter
We were talking about this the other day

Today people have 100mb, even 150mb, internet
Dial up was 14-56kbps

Did the ISP need just a 50mb (is that 50000?) internet connection or something like that to serve the city?

rage2 may know best


its just amazing how we used dial up and within 2 years mobile data was faster than dial up

Me and my friends were downloading like mad in the 90s with cadvision (adsl). Spidering the entire internet lol. The only difference is we had stuff running all the time because of the slow speeds compared to today. But in terms of amount, it was heavy back then as well. People had dedicated PCs that ran downloads 24/7. Calgary was very well wired from early on. US was real poverty time with AOL discs and such which never really amounted to anything in Calgary because we were always a step ahead. In Calgary we were all using DSL before most people in the US even started getting online with dial-up. The only thing AOL discs were used for up here were Frisbees.

[blairtruck]

computers were running 24/7 downloads never stopped

[E36M3]

They probably would have started with a couple T1s (or even a shared T1) as I believe they started as a dialup provider. Those were only 1.5 mbit. From there they likely scaled to partial T3 then full T3/OC-3 which are almost 50 mbit.

Http://www.cadvisionlegacy.com

Originally posted by thetransporter
We were talking about this the other day

Today people have 100mb, even 150mb, internet
Dial up was 14-56kbps

Did the ISP need just a 50mb (is that 50000?) internet connection or something like that to serve the city?

rage2 may know best


its just amazing how we used dial up and within 2 years mobile data was faster than dial up

[jwslam]

Originally posted by BigMass
The only thing AOL discs were used for up here were Frisbees.

You forgot radar deflecting rearview ornaments.

[RealJimmyJames]

Preventing birds from flying into windows and screens.

[sputnik]

When I was working for a large Manitoba ISP in the mid 90s we had about 40000 customers ranging from 14.4 to 56k modems.

At the time we had about 5000 lines and ran the entire ISP with a 100 Mbps connection to the Internet. The modems and 100 Mbps connection were all collocated at the local telco (MTS) and we had a server room (with the DNS, email, web, FTP, NNTP servers) at the office that was connected via a 10 Mbps link.

[ZenOps]

Wayback machine to the rescue!

https://web.archive.org/web/19970223...es/960930.html

Remember when you could actually buy a webbrowser? I did use Netscape way back when.

Dedicate 64 Kilobit ISDN line at $300 per month... Dayum.

Remember when they billed by the hour, long before all night unlimited downloads at 33.6 kilobit was an actual thing in Canada? Its was like the holy grail when Canada started to match the US with unlimited usage at 33.6 kilobit instead of by the hour.

Also of note: Taking 15 minutes to uninstall a program in Windows 3.11 and pray to the PC gods that it didn't erase a critical file. It took 3 and a half days to install Ultima online... Those were the days...

And I'm proud to say: I seem to have only messed up two possibly semi-importantish phone calls that my sister will probably never forgive me for :P