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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.
spotting my old Wikipedia images and 1990ies gear in an 2026 YT video makes me cheer...
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.
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.
Watching this on ADSL
"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.
Last time I was this early AOL was still dial-up.
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.
Every time I think you can't possibly come up with another interesting topic you come up with another interesting topic.
"Many of us might have forgotten it today, now that we have fibre [...]" - **cries in german**
I remember ISDN! I Smell Dollars Now!
This video brought back great memories of that transition from 28.8 to 56k dial-up models to DSL based internet! Nice Journey!
I remember when we finally got ADSL. It was a welcome improvement over dialup; especially in our tiny, rural town.
> many of us might have forgotten it today Well - in Germany 60% of internet connections are DSL... I'm writing this via DSL.
I remember this was the first non-shit internet we got back in early 2000's.
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.
Dear God, what blast from the past.
ADSL was the jam man
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!
1 Mbps DSL was a revolution in 2000 Eastern Ontario. I live in Montreal now and get both HFC and FTTN at 1 Gbit. But I'll always love DSL.