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I define "broadband" for the purposes of this thread as anything over 56k (faster than a dial-up modem).
Living out in the country, our options for broadband have traditionally been limited. We first got broadband in December 2002 with Monet. Monet was a ground-breaking wireless 1xEVDO service, the first of its type in the United States. The modem was a little box with a tiny antenna on top, and connected to your computer via a USB cable. One interesting thing about Monet is it wasn't an "always on" service; you had to connect as you would with a dial-up modem. Typical download speeds were about 600 to 800 kbps (roughly 70 to 90 kb/s) at first (moderately fast for that time), decreasing to around 500 kbps as the service became more popular, and uploads were always about 50 kbps (6 kb/s). If I remember correctly, service was about $30 or $40 / month - a bargain. Unfortunately, Monet folded in March of 2004, and we had to endure dial-up for two more years.
In April of 2006 we had WildBlue satellite internet installed. The Ka-Band dish, an ellipse about 20" wide, was installed on the slant of our roof. The equipment was about $350, and the monthly rate was $80 / month. The downstream speed was approximately 1500 kbps at first, and the upstream speed was pretty consistent at around 200 kbps; these are decent speeds, but the lag was way too long for gaming and even got annoying for casual web browsing. Ping times were a minimum of 600 ms, and often exceeded 1200 ms (1.2s!). I even had times when I got a ping time (to google.com or somewhere else nearby) of 2000 ms! Take a modern website where multiple servers must be contacted, and you could very well spend over 60 seconds completely loading a single website. A tabbed browser was a must for satellite internet (as it was for dial-up). As fall approached, the service became far slower and much less reliable. One aspect of satellite internet service that most heavy users encounter one time or another is the FAP (Fair Access Policy). You were allotted a certain download allocation every month, as specified in your access plan (mine, the top plan, had a limit of around 20 GB), above which they throttled you back to 128 kbps for the remainder of the month. I never exceeded that limit. However, as I soon discovered, a short-term FAP was also in place; your speed was also throttled (to around 256 - 512k) after about 30 minutes of streaming video! As a result of the increasing unreliability of the service, the inability to stream video, etc., I became fed up with WildBlue, but it was my only option for a year.
Then in March 2007 I switched to Clearwire. Even though I technically wasn't in their "coverage area", they found a great signal at my house (I live on a hill). Clearwire was much more reliable and affordable as compared ($40 / month with no equipment fees) to WildBlue. I have been a customer for roughly 3.5 years, and have seen speeds gradually increase. Speeds are generally comparable to WildBlue, although they have become a little bit faster on clear days over the years. However, like other wireless services (especially in marginal zones), it suffers from variations in speed based on weather and almost always-present ping jitter. Using my Squeezebox is especially annoying, as it relies on (ideally low-latency) internet to perform virtually any function, including changing the volume! Granted, it can become irritating, especially during unstable weather (snowstorms seem to be the worse), but it's the best option for me.
It was either 95 or 96. @home beta tested cable internet in our area. $40/month, free hardware (modem and NIC), and speeds of 320kbit/sec. Prior to that, we had something else... ISDN, I think.
I started with Dial-up in the States with Prodigy around 97 when Cox cable was already out I believe but I felt dial-up was good enough and that broadband was an overkill.....boy was I wrong.
I first got PacBell ADSL in 99 and when moved to another place the next year switched to Cox cable and boy was I addicted!
Switching from dial-up to broadband, especially for online gaming, was like night & day!
Now, a decade later, from terrorizing other online gamers to terrorizing visitors on C-D forums. Go figure!
We just got Qwest DSL 3mbps a few days ago.
We have had dial up until then.
One or both of us have been in college for the past several years and we had been keeping the budget as lean as possible. (No student loans.) It was free to get dial up from the college, so we did. We could use college computers for high speed needs.
Now we are both graduated and started decent jobs and Qwest was having a $14.99/mo for 6mo Promo deal for the DSL.
Location: Mableton, GA USA (NW Atlanta suburb, 4 miles OTP)
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My first high speed was a DSL connection through US West in the Twin Cities in November 1998. 640kbps down, and 252kbps up. I still have my Cisco 675 somewhere...
We had Dial-Up (AT&T WorldNet) from Oct 1997 to Sept 2004, when we got Comcast cable broadband internet.
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