#introductions We cobbled together a free-to-use dialup ISP out of trash and spare parts. dialup.world is composed of four modems for simultaneous connections delivering speeds up to 33.6K.
This is currently a bunch of USR Sportsters hooked into Linux, but we are currently working on setups with Cisco gear, as well as some musings in 56K, other weird dialup appliances, and retro networking.
We also supply dialup access to the WebTV Redialed project (http://webtv.zone/) which means if you dig your WebTV out of storage and hook it into a phone line, it just works with no modification needed on your part!
I invite you to watch our bad ideas become reality.
@dialupworld ooooo i adore this. do you possibly have a writeup somewhere of how the specific equipment you're using is glued together? are you running the sportsters off the linux box's serial ports, or have something else set up?
It doesn't look quite as chaotic, but an "all in one" option for doing much the same is a USRobotics NetServer/16 or similar, which are dial in modem banks that can do PPP natively. Then just hook them up to a multi-port voip adapter, or if you get a later type one straight into a T1 card.
@ChartreuseK@dialupworld you just saved me so much work. i had been considering buying a Livingston Portmaster 2e/3e, and ingesting serial port connections from physical external modems. This was the setup we had at the ISP I worked at as a kid.
@vga256@dialupworld My original "home" setup was a pair of 16-port modem banks, but picked up the netserver and that was so much less hassle for simple PPP.
@vga256@dialupworld It also can do SLIP and AppleTalk Dialup (IIRC). As well you have have an account that you can log into then telnet to other systems from it.
@vga256@ChartreuseK@dialupworld Hah, at the Cygnus Boston office we had one of those with one or maybe two modems on it - because the real reason we had it was to hang a bunch of embedded boards on for our local "small" cross-compiler test suite, so a bunch of networked physical serial ports in one place was perfect
Got things working better, did a few dial-up Internet PPP sessions.
Turns out Bell Fibe telephone service is VOIP and doesn’t do the full frequency range of a real phone line, but if you cut the modulation scheme down to the older V.34 speeds, it’s useable.
Also Fedora Linux now has a DNS stub resolver so /etc/resolv.conf doesn’t work, instead there’s a resolvectl command to manipulate things.
And of course some telephone lines were broken too.
@AGMS00@mcr314 That's too bad about Bell Fiber's telephone service :( I should probably start making notes of what experiences people have with different providers.
Well, if you have the Fibe hardware, there’s usually an Ethernet port you can use directly instead of dial-up. And it’s 17000 times faster. But costs more.
Their telephone simulation is also electrically wimpy; real phone bells are somewhat quiet rather than earth shatteringly loud. But it does handle rotary dialing well enough now (had ridiculously short timeouts earlier).
@AGMS00@dialupworld no voip system is going to have the frequency range of a POTS. I'm surprised you got anything working. In theory, though, if you can mark the line as FAX, then the VoIP system will actually terminate the V.34, etc. for you and give you a digital channel to the other end.
@mcr314 Why not as good as POTS? Because they’re cheap? POTS evolved to digital telephone exchanges which sampled the signal at 8khz. What does VOIP do? Seemingly always worse, using compression to get lower bit rates.
Someone needs to invent VOIP-HD, with better than POTS quality. Bandwidth is certainly cheap enough now. Maybe even do stereo.
@mcr314 Good point. I wonder if there's some latency impact on the modem's protocol where it wants to know about signal quality on the other end and gets the results back at varying times.
On the other hand, things like dropped data are already handled by various levels of modem and TCP/IP protocols. Though does a dropped chunk of sound upset the modem's synchronisation, causing a resync?
Anyway, yes, new kinds of noise and signal degradation, and many old ones.
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