I can happily report IDNet dial-up is actually Quite Fast!

[esh]

Yep, I'm blazing along here at 5.8-6.0KB/s! Whether I can last the entire week (or possibly longer) without going crazy...? We'll see 

When I was last on dial-up about 15 (ish?) years ago, I only squeezed about 4.2KB/s peak out on my old BT dial-up, so a whole whopping 6KB/s sounds impressive in comparison. Unfortunately no one actually makes websites with dial-up in mind anymore so I'm pretty sure overall it is much, much slower than back then...

Plus browsers try and do all sorts of fancy stuff like pre-grabbing links which is an absolute disaster. Maybe I should dig out Netscape 3?

[Simon]

Go on then, I'll bite.  What's the problem?

[esh]

I thought more people might be affected but I guess it really is very region specific or something... Some data or routing centre caught fire on Friday morning? I don't think it is owned by IDNet though, but something with telecomms in general.

I've been trying to turn on modem compression but it doesn't make much difference, oh well At least there is a 56k service of some kind... A noise I have not heard in many years...

[Simon]

I still have an old Fujitsu 56k modem in the kitchen draw - just in case -   but no, I haven't personally heard about any fires.

[pctech]

They are referring to this one in Northampton http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/09/major-broadband-outage-northampton-uk-business-park-fire.html