Teledat 300 LAN

Life without internet access is near unfathomable in this day and age.

Whether via the corporate office LAN, the cable modem at home, free Wi-Fi at the coffee shop, and/or a smartphone or tablet, almost everyone and their grandmother nowadays has some sort of broadband connection.

In fact, you are probably reading this, here and now, online (as opposed to offline) and without having to worry much about a monthly data cap or time limits. Yes, hipsters, there was indeed a time before we so quickly, freely and casually checked our social media newsfeeds several times a day!

Flashback: Although I had a fat pipe to the 'net from the office, the place I now called home was still very much offline. By late 2001, Deutsche Telekom's T-DSL product range had become too irresistible, and a few months later their service was finally available in my neighbourhood. So I placed an order.

Back then you still had to do this at a T-Punkt brick-and-mortar store where you would also buy and collect your hardware. In this case, the hardware consisted of a Teledat 300 LAN modem that cost all of 119.95 EUR.

Magenta. It's not pink, it's magenta.

The needed splitter (Annex A filter) arrived via mail a few days later but I was left to hook up everything myself which, thanks to adequate documentation, went without drama. The modem got mounted on a wall in my office and just hung there. I could probably count myself among the first 5% of the country's DSL users in 2002 as I launched Netscape and the included PPPoE client on my PC to dash along the Datenautobahn at the breakneck speed of 768 kbps.

With the exception of two or three minor service outages, the modem was a robust and dumb device, almost entirely neglected and underappreciated considering all the data it pumped and the fun it provided. It just silently hung there on the wall, partly obscured by furniture, almost ignored, were it not for its green blinkenlights happily proclaiming that all's well with the world wide web.

A few years later it was paired with a D-Link router. The modem didn't mind; it laboured along quite merrily, witnessing two line rate upgrades as its plastic shell slowly yellowed with age.

On the morning of 16-05-2012 I went to check my email. There was no connectivity. I turned around just in time to see the modem's status lights give their last few flickers before the power LED went out for good -- almost as if it waited one last night before its final dying gasp.

It took no more than a few minutes to find, unpack, connect, and mount a spare functionally-identical replacement ADSL-modem on the same wall mounting screws.

Goodbye, old friend. You served us well for nearly a full decade.