Enthusiasts bond twelve 56K modems together to set dial-up broadband records — a dozen screeching boxes achieve record 668 kbps download speeds

Here’s the money shot: https://youtu.be/LZ259Jx8MQY?t=1240

I wish they had used a better mic but that was like giving my soul a really good scratch.

This was similar to a trick that a few smaller (less serious) hobby-ISPs did back in the days of 14.4k/28.8k modems to take advantage of the “reasonably priced” business plans for ISDN. They’d register multiple businesses at a single address to qualify for the plans, then balance new egress connections across the pool using squid and other magic. Fun times…

The hearing of 3 observers was lost during the handshake.

My first modem was an AT&T 300 baud acoustic coupler. My last was a USRobotics 56k for the BBS I ran till the early 2000s.

I later switched to DSL for my Internet, but the reason we never did this sort of thing was the ISDN was just easier to get bandwidth and the tech existed to do what you needed with a few of them.

12x POTS lines, or 6 full duplex ISDNs.

My 56k never actually achieved that, most of the time it was 33.6 or 28.8.

This is neat, and fun to see them still being tinkered with.

K…bps

Welcome to 1999.

I imagine it sounds amazing

I remember doing this with NetZero accounts. You could trivially hack out the ads, and dial in-twice (if you had two phone lines), and do the bonding. Free slightly less shitty internets. Very useful for Napster and LimeWire back in the day.

More like masochists than enthusiasts.

Glad to see the USR Courier was used here. A venerable workhorse.

I bet you could get slightly quicker speeds if they ran a pihole or something to block ads.

This is kind of an interesting idea. I wonder if it’s feable to reuse all the old 56k modems?

If 12 modems simultaneously handshake and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? You’re damn right it does and probably shattered glass too.

I hate to be that guy, but… Is it time to get DSL?

now stack ‘em on that poptart borzoi

Kilobits or Kilobytes?

Semi-barely-related thing that popped into my brain on imagining the sound of this;

… the UNATCO theme from Deus Ex played by an ‘orchestra’ of floppy drives.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WhbBYLB90U0