@sabi in the plus side, your modems probably made funny sounds 😋.
also it was quote a while until i got landline broadband. until then we had a janky wifi bridge to a neighbor at some point, and i used my 3G surf stick a lot, and it slowed down as soon the meager data cup was used up, so then it was back to ISDNish speeds and squeezing the most data out of it.
i also used to hang out in restaurants with free wifi a lot 😇.
we got VDSL in, uh, 2014 maybe?