On 2023-03-01 13:24, Stewart Russell via talk wrote:
I was slightly surprised how the old scripts I used for dialup over 20 years (and a different country) ago were still used for LTE modem connections, complete with an even larger set of AT commands to control the device. I still think of AT commands as "Hayes" commands, even though Hayes themselves haven't existed this century. (Dennis Hayes still exists personally, as far as I know, as does his business partner Dale Heatherington - who retired at age 37 in the mid 80s, and seems to have had a great time since then.)
Years ago, I had a Nokia 2G phone (the old Rogers IS-136 network, before they switched to GSM) which could use the AT commands to act as a modem. I never used it, as that was an extra cost service.
I guess ppp will be with us forever. I was pretty impressed that someone managed to implement a ppp wifi modem on the very cheap ESP8266 microcontroller. If you have a serial port, you can now talk (not very fast) over wifi: https://www.tindie.com/products/theoldnet/rs232-serial-wifi-modem-for-vintag... (there's a github link to the source in there for folks who might build their own)
PPP is used in PPPoE, as in ADSL internet connections. PPP is an official RFC spec and used in many places you never heard of. For example with routers, you could use PPP over a T1 line. You'd configure it in the CSU. It's also covered in the Cisco CCNA. If you want to get into the gritty details, you can read "Using & Managing PPP", from O'Reilly. It's just a method of providing a layer 2 network over a serial connection. BTW, when I got my first Internet connection (anyone remember io.org?), I used a SLIP connection, which was popular before PPP was commonly used. SLIP required a static config, as it didn't provide connection info, as PPP does.