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A "bit" faster

During my recent house-move, I came across a bit of memorabilia that reminded me just how far digital communications has come in recent times.

The device was a 1200/1200 dial-up modem of the type I used in the mid or late 1980s.

These little beige boxes were a huge step forwards from the old 300/300 acoustically-coupled modems that had been the only option just a few years earlier.

Instead of requiring you to manually dial (and redial, and redial) the number until you heard the connect tone -- then thrust the phone's handset into the large rubber cups, the "high speed" modem plugged straight into the phone line and would auto-dial. Woohoo!

What's more, it would transfer data at a cracking pace -- some four times faster than those old acoustic devices.

I recall tying up my phone line (and that of a friend) for around 12 hours once (in the days of acoustically-coupled 300bps modems) just to transfer a piece of software that was urgently required -- and my fingers were crossed for the entire time, hoping that the line would not drop.

My first experiences with a 1200bps modem were bliss but, although the speed was fast by comparison, I soon lusted for a 2400bps unit.

The rate of progress was very fast about that time so I soon had another beige box that gave me twice the speed and then I set my sights on a 9600bps unit.

I never did get my hands on one though -- because the 14.4Kbps (V32bis?) standard erupted onto the scene and before I'd saved enough pennies, the 9600 units were "old tech".

14.4K lasted me for quite some time and I even started my 7am.com global news network in 1997 using one of these, although I did upgrade pretty quickly to a 33K and eventually a couple of 56K units. Unfortunately, living at the end of a very long piece of country-copper, I seldom saw more than 22Kbps from any of these modems.

When I moved to Tokoroa I got my first experience of broadband by hooking up to the JetStream 128Kbps ADSL service.

Wow... the speed!

Wow... you could talk on the phone *and* surf the Net at the same time, over the same line! Wasn't 2003 technology wonderful?

Fast as it might have seemed at the time however, 128Kbps was pretty damned slow and I recall it took *many* hours to transfer an advance copy of the Scrapheap Challenge episode I'd appeared in from the UK to NZ by this means.

And now to today...

Although my DSL speeds at the new address are no where near as good as they were at my last location, I'm still getting a sync rate of 6Mbps some of the time and throughputs that are 4Mbps to 5Mbps during off-peak periods.

Now I can watch streams of broadcast-quality video and (on a good day) even HD stuff.

Downloading an entire CD's worth of data (such as a Linux distro) takes just a few minutes and I listen to NatRad via streaming audio for most of the day.

But now I lust for UFB.

Now I want 100Mbps so that those HD video streams don't start buffering in the evenings.

I want to be able to upload my 1GB HD YouTube videos in seconds rather than hours (thanks to ADSL's awfully asymmetric bandwidth allocation).

And once UFB arrives, the performance of that 1200bps modem will have been eclipsed by almost five orders of magnitude in less than 30 years.

The real question is (of course), will I look back at this column in another 20 years time and wonder how on earth we managed with a paltry 100Mbps of connectivity -- or will UFB meet all our data needs for the foreseeable future?

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