I just happen to be pondering over this ad from digit past issue and was thinking of my childhood experiences with reliance and tata photo dongles . I'm a 2001 kid and wanted to know what was your life before Android Phones or 4G became common .....
Lol club penguin used to take 10-15 minutes to load in 2008. Thats all i remember. Also, many flash games took long time but once cached they wud run fast. I used to play papa louie games too.
I got my first android smartphone, Galaxy Y, in late 2010 & got a BSNL 3G SIM. That was my first time using a data pack on my phone, I think.
Before that, I had a BSNL broadband since 2008 maybe, prior to that, the dial up stuff since maybe 2005/06. Those days, digit's CDs were my goto source for legit software & there were some ahem sellers locally as well.
In early days, my internet usage was kind of restricted but later I used to play some games online, like some hotwheels game, some mafia stuff, etc. This was likely after 2008 as my old desktop couldn't run new games. Around the same time, I registered in this forum. I built my first gaming PC in 2010 & mostly spent time playing offline games on it later on.
I had MTNL phone line and when I got my 1st PC in 2005 for around 35K (P4 2.4Ghz, 128Mb RAM, 40GB HDD Windows XP Home) was n00b about RAM size. Thought of connecting Dial-up modem and after multiple failed attempted the internet was connected, was SUPER HAPPY to see Google Search page load (I literally jumped off my chair). Speed was 46Kbps, opened some websites in excitement and then closed due to fear of high post paid bill. Thankfully Bill came around Rs 150 for that month and data usage was 50mb I think
I bought Tata Photon+ dongle in 2010 for Rs 3000 I believe that too for 10GB data limit per month and 3.6Mbps speed
Recharge was Rs 900 I think or more.
Lowest recharge was Rs 150 for 100Mb
Telecom companies were exploiting a lot till 2015 and then came the MESSIAH.
I remember waiting all night to download a movie of 700/800 MB, and then waking up early to watch it in morning with excitement.
Those were the days... anyone remember Limewire? Oh the nostalgia.
before the advent of 4g,i was stuck with bsnl broadband with its paltry download speeds of upto 200 kbps(yes,even in this day and age their premium plans costing upto 1k per month offer such pathetic speeds)-and their connection broke down every few weeks/days and was a pain to get fixed.Bsnl's employees were notoriously rude and demanded bribes even for fixing basic problems like severed phone cables(which they are supposed to do for free).
frustrated,i stopped using bsnl for good and moved to mobile internet-although its quite restrictive in terms of the amount of data i can use during day times,the speeds are much better and the connection is also a lot more stable.Earlier while using tools like Gmeet the connection speeds dropped and i got kicked out of meetings every so often-now it happens very rarely.
prior to that ,when i had bsnl,i used to wait 2-3 days to download large files of upto 3-4 gbs or more-it was a very frustrating experience to say the least.Even downloading a 1gb movie from warez sites took around 2-3 hrs.
the situation was even worse in the early days of bsnl when it offered much slower speeds,i think in the beginning it was 25kbps,then it increased to 50 kbps,followed by 100 kbps then finally ending with 200 kbps.And bsnl used to trumpet its "Supposed" faster download speeds in newspaper adverts and portrayed it like some kind of a divine gift from the almighty! And people lapped it up too,as better options were not easy to come by in those days.
Many of my friends who lived in city areas ditched bsnl and got cable internet,which offered much faster download and browsing speeds,but i was stuck with bsnl for a long time as cable was not available at our place.And the 3g phones of yesteryears were also pretty slow and unreliable-very frequently the speeds reduced to 2g(edge) while browsing,and sometimes the network strengths dropped so low that internet stopped working altogether.
Suffice it to say that we have come a long way since then.
I used connect 256kbps plan. But I never got that speed. Tried complaining many times but nothing wud worked. Used for 3 years than ditched to photon data card. After that jio sim and at last fiber.
Remeber Yahoo Messenger? Was an interesting thing back then with all those emojis and special effects. Good timepass after school with friends
Yahoo Messenger truly makes me nostalgic than anything. Finding a chat room trying to find one decent person to talk and finding most are spammers were the days!
And everyone going: A/S/L?
