Went from 56K to 3Mbps cable. It was mind-blowingly fast at the time.
But then in 2004 my parents had to go back to dialup for awhile to save money, which was brutal. Especially since I would video chat with my GF often and download all sorts of stuff from KaZaA. Have you ever tried to do a video call on dialup? 0.1-0.5 FPS and compressed so badly that it's hard to make out even basic facial features. It's a miracle that it worked at all.
August 2001, I moved from Berks County PA, where I was a hundred feet or so too far from getting DSL, to central Maryland where there was Comcast cable already in my apartment.
I think it was 2007, the family upgraded to a 3G modem when Telstra got around to putting up a tower that provided mobile reception where we were living. I was pretty happy as with the quality of rural phone lines we weren't even getting the full potential of dial up (maxxed out at 30 ish kB/s).
Of course the next problem was trying to keep under the tiny download caps of the time, I remember having to wait until the end of the month (when usage was about to reset) to download large files or risk having my parents and siblings annoyed at me for using up all the quota...
Was only paying for 128Kbps down but this was before they actually had any throttling in place, and I was close enough to the DLAM to get 1Mbit down. It was mind-blowing at a time when a 1.44Mbps T1 line was $1000+/month pipe dream!
2002~2003 We got a glorious "high speed cable internet" of 1mb when we were kids. My mom got pissed off that we were waking up at 4 am to play Tibia on school days and hired it. In my country, dial-up was free before 6 am and past midnight, and after 2 pm past saturday, so we had to play while it was free. She got really mad at us, but instead of taking the pc away, she realized that the game was helping us learn English and decided to hire cable internet. I bet my home was one of the first ones in my city to have """good""" internet back then. None of my peers at school had it until a couple of years later.
I got ISDN from work in 1995. MSN was my ISP for some reason. It was glorious! In FPS shooters I had a 30 ping while everyone else had 200. I was a beast !
Stopped selling it in about 2001? Stopped using it in 1999. I was fortunate enough to have been part of an ISP startup when T1 was coming in, and my apartment was serviced by me.
Fun times, I ran a BBS and traveled around my town to the 3 ISPs that had started or were starting (all tiny) asking for a job. One of them was 2 guys who were setting up 300 external modems in a York Properties building basement. I got to be employee #3 on site, learned so much there since it was ground up.
When I went to university in 2003. The telephone exchange in the village my parents lived in finally got upgraded to ADSL in 2004 or 2005 I think after a grassroots ISP collected enough subscribers to pay for it (after which the national telco was happy to start offering service, screwing over the grassroots ISP)
University internet was 10 Mbps, but the year after they kicked the dorms off the school network and put us on the consumer city fiber network which was 100 Mbps. About a decade later I moved in somewhere with 1 Gbps.
And I now have 10 Gbps at home. How times have changed...
1998 I moved to cable modem in Argentina. Around that time also moved to optical mouse Microsoft IntelliMouse and 3dfx video card. In 2008 I got my first SSD. I think those thing were one of the most shocking technologies I experienced.
I went to college in 1997 and went from 28.8kbps dialup to a 2.4gbit OC-48. I had no idea how slow the rest of the internet was until I had a better connection than most servers (at the time).
Edit: I was connected to the dorm ethernet via 10mbit NICs. So even with 5 PCs running in my dorm room, we were only using a fraction of the available bandwidth.
I worked for the department that ran student computer labs (before most people started bringing computers to college with them). That's where the real epic lan parties happened. Every time we'd update the desktops we'd celebrate with an all-nighter lan party for staff and friends.
99/2000ish i suspect? It was an Optus@Home cable connection when "netstats" was still used. It was sold as an "unlimited" plan, but really it was 10x the average download of your node.
For us, it really was unlimited because we were the only people on our node for ages. As more people connected, we started hitting the limit pretty regular.
You could also spy on your net neighbours usage because the cable modem logging (available via telnet and a default username and password) showed every connection on your node. Not sure of the technical side of this - I think because cable was in a daisy chain from node to properties and back?
Because we were early adopters, sending +++ATH0 in ping packets was super effective too heh.
I am not 100% sure on the exact year, but some time in the mid, possibly late, 2000s is when I think my family ditched it.
All I know is I have memories of it being somewhere around 2011-12 and not wanting to have the router moved out of my grandma's room because mine was directly below hers, which narrows it down to probably before 2010. Didn't live outside society, either.
I was able to convince my mum to start with DSL right away. Must have been 1999/2000. Before that I was able to at least use ISDN at my uncle‘s place. When I was spending time at my best friend‘s place, I encountered AOL dial up the first time. It was awful.
I haven't thought about ISDN in ages. IIRC I had to get a serial expansion card with a faster UART to get the benefit, which was...eh, dubious. Twice nothing is still nothing LMAO.
I'm not exactly sure when we had first upgraded from 56.6k dialup to a DSL(? If I am remembering the acronym right; it was phone line broadband not cable) line. I was still playing Ultima Online at the time so it had to be prior to 2003 (I quit when Age of Shadows fucked the game all up).
By 2007, we had cable Internet and it was like triple the speeds of the DSL.
Oooh yeah, ISDN. My cable solution that I got in year 2000 (to answer OP's question) didn't work very well, and DSL wasn't an option yet I think.
For those ready to listen to my nostalgia:
ISDN was awesome because even the smallest solution had two channels. So two phonecalls on one line. Great for businesses. Also, a channel had 64 kbit, slightly faster than the analog modems which I think maxed out at 54 kbit, which was often unlikely to be reached.
But the trick is, the two channels could be combined to 128 kbit. An incoming or outgoing phonecall would simply reduce the speed back to 64, instead of interrupting the connection.
Although I paid by the minute, and using two channels doubled the cost, so I usually only used it when I was literally waiting for a data transfer and would be paying the same price anyway.
Actually, I think my ISDN would count as dial-up, as I paid by the minute.
I don’t know how much it costs. I remember being shocked at the price but the company was willing to pay, so great. At the time, there weren’t too many people able to work from home
2004 or 2005, because my mom started working from home and got cable. Once I left home, it was fiber pretty much everywhere except the year or two I used DSL. I'm currently on a weird fiber backed Ethernet network (Ethernet to the home), and we're rolling out real fiber over the next couple of years.
Well.....now you're just going to have to share your time machine with the rest of us!
What? I assume you DO have a time machine, right? You clearly have cutting edge technology decades before anyone else. I think I only got above 5MB/sec internet about 5 years ago? Now it's suddenly 100MB/Sec internet, and I'm like "Ok cool........I'm still not doing anything that requires that much speed....."
I live in Sweden. It was common with ethernet connections in the apartments when I was growing up. So not a time machine. But I could be getting the exact year wrong a little bit.
And it was 10 mbit connections, so that's just about 1 mbyte / second. Still plenty fast when it arrived.
Today I have 500 mbit connection with option for 1000 mbit. It's common here.
Edit: I asked chatgpt and it was 1999 that the first apartments got 10 mbit / sec connections. So I was off with about 5 years actually.
Depends on what you mean by "stop using". We never even had Internet at the house I grew up in, but for at least one job around 2000, we had dial-up on standby in case the ISDN went down, and occasionally used it for side projects even when the ISDN was working. (In fact I'm not sure we ever needed to fail over in the time I was there.). One of those side projects was mine, which means that ~2000 was the first and last time I was a dial-up user.
But then there's provisioning dial-up, which is kind of using it from the other end ...iiif you squint a bit. In that case people were still occasionally signing up with another company I worked for circa 2014. I could probably have found the usage stats back then, but was never curious enough to check and never had the need to, and I've since moved on.
Best as I can tell, that company no longer offers sign-ups to old-school dial-up service. Can't say I'm surprised. I do wonder if they've any old accounts grandfathered in though. I don't remember the dial-up number to check if there's something modem-y on the other end.
March 2000. Bigpond Cable. Such a step up in speed (although I can't remember what that initial cable speed was) and suddenly we were always connected.
I had a faster connection than anyone I knew at that time :)
And you could play Ultima Online faster than anyone connected. You'd get on top of your steed, and run off 3x faster than anyone else. Then they'd be like "HEY! HE'S CHEATING SOMEHOW!!!"
My first "broadband" was Hughes satellite internet, due to living in a rural location. It was hot garbage, but it was better than dialup.
The speeds were Ok (for me), but the data cap (applied daily) was draconian. I don't recall the specific amount but it basically made it impossible to stream video in any capacity.
There was a 3-hour period from midnight to 3am every night where the cap didn't count. That effectively became internet time because it was unusable otherwise.
......ok......kinda suspicious honestly. That would be like me asking "Hey, do you have any bread in your house?" and your response is to get weirded out that I'm asking, and burn your house down so I don't discover anything.
.........the fuck were you doing with your internet???
I used to live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. And I believe we had dial up until 2010. I specifically remember our first Wi-Fi router being an 802.11G Belkin 54G router. And our first high-speed internet was 1.5mbps fiber. We upgraded from 1.5mbps to 3mbps and then to 7mbps by the time I moved out. Because that was my childhood home. I can also remember that at that time, I thought our school internet was super fast. And yet we were sharing a T1 line for the entire school. But it was still way faster than the dial up I had at home.
I think our household was the first in my primary school class to get broadband, which I think was the late 90s. It was still measured in kbps (like 250-500 or so?), but it didn’t cost more to be online permanently. (ADSL).
Was 19 still living at home when my Dad switched us to something called "@home" broadband, which became Comcast a couple years later. I do remember being blown away by seeing images load almost instantly on a web page.
That was also the last year I remember using Netscape Navigator as a daily driver. It was IE for the next four years until I switched to Firefox, and have been using that ever since. Yes, IE blows, but Navigator was starting to become a bloated mess as it started to suffer from feature creep trying to win people back.