Hardware

Once upon a time I used a phone line in a camping ground put in by a new company called Sprint. For the short time we used it, we had a solid 53333 bits/sec, which is perfect 56k because of technical reasons. It was glorious. Still not cable, but at the time it was something else from having grown up with 300/1200 baud in the past, being able to read the text as it came in.

PCIe 1x -> 4 serial port cards exist. Multilane PCIe slots can be bifurcated to the point that, in theory, you could have as many cards as the CPU had PCIe lanes. The biggest number I've seen for number of PCIe lanes in one system is 256 (in a dual-socket Epyc server), which means it could theoretically support 1024 serial modems and a connection speed of 57 Mbps.

The practical limit is gonna be a lot lower though, because the biggest actual motherboard I've found had 3 PCIe 16x slots, 2 PCIe 8x slots, 1 M.2 (x4) slot, 5 SlimSAS (U.2 x4) ports, 1 external serial port and 1 internal serial header, for a total of 88 accessible PCIe lanes and thus 162 modems. That would equate to 9 Mbps of bandwidth.

Perhaps the LED stays on without PSU power (CMOS battery status LED)?

This is a relatively big channel. It's unlikely they they would make such a mistake.

It has been quite a while so I’m fuzzy on it, but I had a board with a status LED and it would stay on for a bit as the capacitors drained? Generally a good thing to watch when you wanted to properly pull power from it for whatever reason though, especially with how often I was thoroughly crashing it and then resetting things with my overclocks. :P

I once dropped a screw into a running PC and it shorted. Sparks and all. I just turned it back on again and it was fine.

From the video: lack of non-conflicting serial ports.

Probably couldn't find a telecom willing to bother with that many POTS landlines.

From what I gather from watching the video, 12 is just the number of functional modems they had on hand.

Well, probably not this thing specifically; it's highly inefficient on so many levels to use several POTS landlines in one household.

But the home computer waste is so insane in general. In 2012, I bought a state-of-the-art system for a little over 2k, because my old one had gotten too slow for professional backend development. It was very nice, and, well, I still have it to this day. Right now I'm doing stick-boots to try if I can run Linux with a mix of Nvidia and Radeon GPUs after Win10 support ends.

I think that the computer game industry is a scam, and only retro-gaming makes sense. Why? It diverts the question. The actual question is: Are newer games more fun? And I think the answer is no, not just for myself, but for pretty much everyone. Did the people playing vanilla WoW have less fun, or the people playing PS-1...Wii with their friends? I doubt it. Why not? Because the fun does not increase even one bit when the graphics is more realistic. We already have realistic graphics in the real world, or we can look at a photograph, watch a show; there is 0 gain from having it also in our games. It's just a 1-time "woa Dude" effect. Advertisement creates an artificial need which cleverly checks several boxes. Just to name a few: Gaming PC / Console as a symbol of status, working towards a goal and then attaining it. And the ones who see through it are pulled in anyway, because their online games are being abandoned.

Specific to what theylre doing here, the problem is that analog modems are really designed around working around the limitations of past telco systems, doing data transport over systems designed to move only voice, and those mostly don't exist any more.

I mean, it's theoretically possible that you have 12 analog lines available to you and no way to directly put digital data on a line, but I'd guess that it's not very likely. I was actually looking to see if there are still any ISPs in the US that provide nationwide dial-up internet service at all, and IIRC, the answer is "yes", but it's down to one or two, and I suspect that they're just doing it because they basically have all the remaining users for whom the technical barrier of switching to some form of digital transport is too much of a hurdle.

EDIT: Also, there are various forms of wireless Internet now. IIRC, one gets about 100 ms of latency on a PPP connection running over an analog modem. I bet that even LEO satellite Internet like Starlink beats that on latency.

kagis

https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1470-99699-90

Latency ranges between 25 and 60 ms on land, and 100+ ms in certain remote locations (e.g. Oceans, Islands, Antarctica, Alaska, Northern Canada, etc.).

Yeah. And that's gonna be one of the weakest points of satellite Internet service.