Getting online

I was recently looking at the options for getting online as my various contracts were coming to an end. It made me a bit nostalgic thinking about the different ways I have connected online.

Using a dial up modem with a service like CompuServe with access to their bulletin boards for the first time was a bit like today getting into a self driving car for the first time. The Internet wasn’t everywhere but only a few people were using it.

As more people went online the question of speed started to be asked. And in response, some of the telecom companies offered the ISDN service.

By joining two lines together you could max out at 128k rather than 56k over a dial up.

In the UK, cable companies offering television services started to offer internet connections over their network. Switching from ISDN to an always on high speed connection was the change that made surfing the web a predictable cost effective way of life. Having a fixed monthly cost rather than having to pay for the number of minutes on the telephone allowed online time without the worry of a big bill.

In my area of London, the Telewest (which became Virgin Media) connection was always faster than what BT could offer on DSL/ADSL. I can’t remember the speed I was offered at the end of 2000 but in 2008 I have an email offering a free upgrade from 4Mb to 10Mb.

Today in June 2025 Virgin Media is offering 1130Mbps as their top tier.

The thing that has changed in the last 25 years is that the copper wiring in the telephone infrastructure has been gradually changing to fibre optic. In the last few months or so companies like Community Fibre and Hyperoptic have been competing for the Virgin Media 1Gb service in my area.

You would think that Virgin Media would be fighting back as the hub I currently have says it is DOCSIS 3.1 which has a theoretical download top speed of 10Gb. I mean, Virgin Media at time of writing don’t support IPv6 when BT do. It just feels like Virgin Media are falling behind on the tech front.

In the next few days I hope to get a BT fibre connection installed and I will update as soon as this happens.

26 June 2025 Having time to reflect and do a bit more research on this I realised a couple of things. The first is that the 56k dial up modem wasn’t the first modem I purchased. I think I had a 28.8k modem or maybe a 14.4k one.

The other thing I discovered is that the Virgin Media connection I had installed in 2000 is based on a technology that has fibre cables to the street cabinet with a higher quality copper cable going to the premises. This technology is being upgraded by Virgin Media O2 but won’t be complete for at least a few years.

For now, the Openreach network is more likely to be able to provide that fibre cable to the premises.

I’m not sure if it was just chance but as soon as the Openreach contractor left there was a knock on the door by a Community Fibre salesperson seeing if I was interested in switching to them. There does seem to be very healthy competition for service provision over the Openreach fibre network in London anyway.