It would have been difficult (expensive) for a BBS to support 56k. The calling side modem could be on an analog POTS line, but the called side needed a digital circuit, usually a PRI (T1 with ISDN signaling.) It was far easier for them to support 64/128kbps ISDN -- all they needed was one or more dual-channel BRI lines.

56k wasnt standardized until 2000, though the draft was available a little earlier. There was also the very short lived K56flex and X2 technologies that came out in 1997, but ISP support and sales were pretty low.

X2 had just come out, and AOL (among others) had been advertising the new connection speeds. Didn't do me much good with my external 9600 baud modem.

My mother has a friend who was an engineer at US Robotics at that time. I must've been 11 or 12. I told him how I loved going online, and he found out about my ancient modem, and said he was going to send me an upgrade.

I was expecting a used 28.8 or even 14.4, but a few weeks go by and package comes. I come home from school and a shrink wrapped 56k X2 Sportster is sitting on my counter.

The difference was incredible. Connecting at 5x the speeds I used to get was life changing. I used that modem for at least seven years before broadband came along.

DSL and Cable were available at my house in 1999, but I didn't get broadband until 2003. The $49.95/mo was just too expensive. (Compared to the $10/mo for dialup)

LOL, I did pretty much the same thing, just not for as long. I remember it took about a day after I had it installed that suddenly every house I was looking to buy "had to have @Home service" (there wasn't another provider where I was looking). I can't remember how long it took before it became a mild crisis when internet service was out.

Amazing how far things have come. I work at home, now. Late into the COVID lockdown, the $120/mo Business internet service that hasn't gone down since it was installed (like ten years ago?)[0], was intermittently down for a week, with some periods exceeding 24-hours[1]. I was already at a permanent remote work gig and though I could still write code, there were certain things that were impossible being unable to connect to anything.

I'm a cord cutter and this was COVID lock-down so nothing was open. With no internet/YouTube/TikTok/Snapchat/etc/etc/etc ... you'd think we were living under candle-light boiling water for a bath the way the kids were behaving (insult to injury, it was freezing outside, their mobile service was awful in the house so they were dry).

Seriously, though, there were moments during that week that I was like ... "so what now ... early bedtime?"

[0] Technically it went down once, shortly after install, when the service provider I had left had cut the wrong line while terminating my service. To my new provider's credit, they send someone out an hour after I called -- at 5:30 PM -- and fixed it without charge. They'd charge now, but everything goes downhill ...

[1] The reason I pay for the Business service is this reliability. I was told "when there's maintenance, they send an e-mail and it's late/over the weekend." My neighbors have lost service several times when I've been fine. There's "no guarantee service will always work" but the outage was caused by the provider botching a Gigabit upgrade that was supposed to be short/weekend/evening, customers were never notified about and ended up being a prolonged outage.

Metros got the good stuff earlier! The little rural town in Illinois where I grew up, Bushnell, only got local dialup in early 1997, and something approximating broadband in about...2010(? I left in 2001); even that was lastmiled with wireless. I knew the guy that ran the dialup ISP. They managed to get a T1 to the bank HQ downtown and put their modem banks there. 33.6 when they launched, 53k a little later on, and I rarely saw it handshake faster than about 46k. But we were glad of every kilobit.

Even in LA I don’t think I saw much more than a brief burst of 53K. It really needed everything lined up correctly and my old building with too many party lines was a noisy mess.