"DAB sounds worse than FM" wrote in message news:[email protected]

If you use the maximum speed available then where do you draw the line
with cost? I'm sure that if someone had the money they could have had
some stupidly expensive link installed just for surfing the net at home
even in 1995, although if you remember back to 1995 then the web was so
frigging slow that it would have been a bit of a waste of time.

You're so wrong!

In 1995 I regularly saw download speeds of 1Mbps. The best I
experienced was 4.5Mbps. This was at Birmingham university - IIRC we
were one of the few universities on superJANET at the time. American
sites were a different matter, but UK sites (and, obviously,
especially academic sites) were very fast.

I've no idea what it was like for people "at home" - I didn't have a
modem. I know the LAN connection to the internet at Essex university
always seemed painfully slow after Birmingham. And the broadband at
work can be slower than the connection at Essex. As for the "56k"
modem at home...!

Cheers,
David.

experienced was 4.5Mbps. This was at Birmingham university - IIRC we
were one of the few universities on superJANET at the time.

You remember incorrectly. In 1995 JISC had 'taken delivery' of SuperJANET
II, and almost all universities were on it, plus a few other HE sites. The
backbone was a mixture of 34Mbps and 155 Mbps ATM using experimental IP over
ATM and some SDH at 34Mbps. The links out to EU networks were 155Mbps SDH.
The backbone, even at this early stage was designed to support the
development of MANs to cover geographical regions, so you weren't even
independantly linked to the backbone, but through a connection-sharing
router for your MAN.

Anyway, back to the point of the thread :-

If you wanted such a connection at home at the time - tough luck! A lot of
the networking done was in collaboration with BT at what was essentially a
R&D level, and you certainly weren't going to get JANET to lash up a home
link for you. The cost was in the millions, and was part of the JISC
strategic plan for HE. It was arguably the fastest, certainly the larget
netowke in Europe at the time.

David