[HN Gopher] AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
___________________________________________________________________
AOL to discontinue dial-up internet
Author : situationista
Score : 123 points
Date : 2025-08-11 07:15 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| hopelite wrote:
| I've always wondered about the remaining users of the dial-up
| service. Who are they and what is the use case for using dial-up?
|
| Does anyone know?
| imzadi wrote:
| Probably people in rural areas that have limited access to
| other options. Starlink has probably absorbed most of that
| market, so no need to have dial up anymore.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Starlink is so much more expensive though, more than a lot of
| people in rural areas can afford.
| morkalork wrote:
| Cellular internet. Edit: I'm not saying it's a _good_
| replacement for dialup, just that I have observed that many
| cell phone carriers are advertising plans for it now.
| yladiz wrote:
| In very rural places, they may only have edge or 3g at
| best, if they have any connection.
| clint wrote:
| Where I live in Colorado there is literally no cell
| coverage by any cellular provider. No 5/4/or 3G coverage
| in miles in any direction while outside and no matter how
| far up the mountain behind my house I climb.
|
| Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and
| they don't really care that its not true.
| codazoda wrote:
| Many rural areas have no cellular service. I vacation in
| an area where Satellite, landline phone service, and some
| very bad DSL service are the only options. Since it's a
| vacation spot, we opt not to use the internet there, but
| there are people who live there.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Rural mountainous areas have very bad cell coverage. When
| I grew up the local Verizon store didn't actually get
| signal and you had to drive up the road from there to
| take calls.
|
| Those are the kinda places I imagine are expensive to run
| new installs to, so it's really phone lines or satellite
| jlokier wrote:
| Here is "ping 8.8.8.8" showing latency over cellular
| internet some of the time, and I live in the centre of a
| city: 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8:
| icmp_seq=6145 ttl=114 time=363613.635 ms 64 bytes
| from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6175 ttl=114 time=334289.726 ms
| 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6176 ttl=114
| time=333689.274 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8:
| icmp_seq=6177 ttl=114 time=332851.621 ms 64 bytes
| from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6178 ttl=114 time=332673.845 ms
| 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6179 ttl=114
| time=332618.215 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8:
| icmp_seq=6180 ttl=114 time=331634.496 ms 64 bytes
| from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6181 ttl=114 time=330736.758 ms
| 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6182 ttl=114
| time=331050.087 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8:
| icmp_seq=6183 ttl=114 time=330813.820 ms
| dbbr wrote:
| 5+ minutes for 8.8.8.8 to respond to a ping! Or am I
| reading this incorrectly?
| jandrese wrote:
| You can spend more for the higher tier plan that won't
| get your traffic prioritized down into the "best effort"
| tier. It looks like your neighbors have already done
| that. You may need to buy directly from whomever is
| running your towers and not a MVNO to get that.
|
| Honestly, I'm actually shocked and impressed that
| whatever is queuing your data up has enough buffer space
| to hold on the packets for so long without dropping them.
| Spivak wrote:
| No idea why you're being downvoted. I can right now today
| call AT&T and get 300Mb cellular internet for my house.
| It's $65/mo.
| clint wrote:
| You would be surprised how much people in extremely rural
| areas are being gouged for really crappy internet.
|
| I have a place less than an hour from Denver and without
| Starlink there are many, many people on extremely bad,
| oversubscribed 1Mbit DSL at the end of some gnarly POPs.
|
| There are sometimes local ISPs that provide p2p wifi in
| extremely limited areas (see: rich neighborhoods) and its
| fine but for 20/10 you're paying similar prices or more
| than Starlink for something that's less reliable.
| londons_explore wrote:
| But 56k dialup (actual speed more like 25k) is too slow
| to load an https certificate before most sites time out.
| You aren't going to be able to load google.com
| clint wrote:
| You'll notice I didn't mention dialup at all in my
| comment.
| jonbiggums22 wrote:
| Dialup could be had for very cheap last time I had if (big
| if) you had availability of cellular internet that is
| probably just as cheap now. However, the landline I had for
| dialup back in the day had become outright ridiculous in
| price by the time I convinced my wife we should cancel it
| (she liked that it worked when the power was out). It seems
| they don't even want to sell that service anymore.
|
| VoIP is cheap but you need internet for VoIP and I'm not
| actually sure you could connect a modem to a VoIP even if
| it wasn't nonsensical.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| AT&T used to be the default landline provider for my
| address, but they recently got the regulators to release
| them from that responsibility, so now there isn't one. So
| I can't buy a landline for my property, even though
| there's copper running right past it and a pedestal where
| all they'd have to do is reconnect the line to my house.
| If I call AT&T, they'll sell me a cell phone, but not a
| landline.
|
| Fortunately I have fiber (from another company), so it's
| not a problem; but the concept of being able to get a
| landline anywhere is going away.
| jonbiggums22 wrote:
| Yeah, I think the POTS line is gone for good since I
| canceled it. The company doesn't even show it as an
| offering on their website any longer, only selling VoIP
| with DSL at this point. The cranked up price was probably
| a nudge to get rid of any holdouts.
| fapjacks wrote:
| No, it is not feasible to run modem signals over VOIP, as
| the various codecs all compress signals and cut
| frequencies and all manner of things to reduce bandwidth
| consumption, which are incompatible with modem signaling.
| You could get away with it in a homelab for fun, but you
| have absolutely no control over what VOIP codecs e.g.
| Comcast is running, so it is effectively impossible. Even
| if the phone company says they can offer you a copper
| line, your copper line will eventually get converted to
| VOIP at the end of the street or wherever, and then it's
| up to whatever commercial provider you're paying to
| choose the codecs for VOIP, which are never modem-
| friendly. I worked on this stuff about ten years ago.
| There are fax codecs but they are very hard to get
| working reliably.
| icedchai wrote:
| I've done modem calls over VOIP. Any connection above
| 2400 is incredibly unstable for the reasons you describe.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Senior citizens who don't know any better and never
| upgraded.then in their 50s now in their 70-80s.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It couldn't be too many people. Back in 2015, they only had 2.1
| million dial up users and that number must have gone down in a
| decade
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/08/10/aol-dial-up-i...
|
| But then again, I would love to have a business that has 2.1
| million people or even 100 thousand people paying $10 a
| month...
| londons_explore wrote:
| Doesn't seem to make sense for AOL to shut it down... I'm
| sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy
| who understands telephony and software modems.
|
| Even with 100k customers, I doubt there are more than 0.1% of
| them connected at a time - the rest will just be paying the
| bill for a service they don't use.
| protocolture wrote:
| >I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just
| 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems.
|
| Pretty much. But you might find reliably hardware hard to
| come by. It would be an ebay operation for sure, sort of
| like running an internet history museum.
| londons_explore wrote:
| software modems have been a thing for ages. No physical
| wires - it'll be voip direct to soft modems on a couple
| of big linux servers.
|
| You can probably do it all on AWS with no physical infra.
| toast0 wrote:
| There's a few dial up wholesalers out there still. I don't
| know if the AOL dialer is still proprietary, but I would
| imagine they could outsource at least most of the pops to
| keep the revenue flowing, if they really wanted to.
|
| OTOH, maybe shutting down AOL dialup helps Verizon drop its
| landline business. All the ILECs seem to be in a race to
| eliminate landlines.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Probably people who have had a recurring payment set up since
| 1995 and never questioned what they're paying $23.99 per month
| for the last 30 years for.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I know at least two people who are still paying for an AOL
| dial-up subscription despite not using because they use an
| @aol email address and think it will be discontinued if they
| don't continue to pay for it.
| criddell wrote:
| Are they wrong?
| Supermancho wrote:
| Yes
| InitialLastName wrote:
| As far as I can tell, yes. AOL pretends that the
| subscription offers other services (tech support,
| "security" etc) but you definitely appear to be able to
| keep access to your email address without paying the
| $50/month subscription.
| bluedino wrote:
| I switched phones and somehow lost my Netscape (owned by
| AOL) email password. Would'nt have been a big deal but I
| had it linked to some famous .com service that I have
| been using since the 90's. I paid something like $10 to
| have a live human reset the password and get back in.
| torgoguys wrote:
| I had an elderly friend that still subscribed to AOL dialup
| until he died a couple of years ago. He had built his small
| business, which was very dependent on email, using an old AOL
| email address. The type of business he was in could involve old
| contacts suddenly appearing out of the blue again (via an email
| message) and so he wanted to maintain the AOL address to not
| lose that business.
|
| Long ago, when AOL stopped requiring an AOL subscription to
| maintain an AOL email address, I advised him to cancel the AOL
| subscription. After explaining to me how important that exact
| address was to him he declined, stating that by paying the
| monthly fee he felt very assured the email address wouldn't go
| away and without paying for he felt like that assurance just
| wasn't there. So for years he knowingly paid for dialup he no
| longer actually used.
| da02 wrote:
| What type of business was it? Consulting?
| torgoguys wrote:
| He was a psychiatrist and did in-person corporate trainings
| on understanding and maximizing interpersonal communication
| in companies and teams. Myers-briggs types of things but I
| like to think his stuff was more valuable.
| stetrain wrote:
| There are still a lot of people without access to broadband, or
| with only one provider which may be expensive.
|
| https://www.benton.org/blog/more-third-americans-have-access...
|
| Starlink is definitely increasing availability but it's
| somewhat expensive.
| xunil2ycom wrote:
| I have Starlink for my personal/family internet and AT&T DSL
| for my wife's work-from-home office. They are comparably
| priced.
|
| What is really expensive is that AT&T wants a good $30k to
| build fiber out to my location. . . so I'm sticking with
| paying for two providers at the moment.
| MDGeist wrote:
| I had an aunt who was a hold out until this past year. She was
| in a rather wooded and sparsely populated area and although
| faster internet became available awhile ago it was much more
| expensive and she was already used to the limitations of dial-
| up so she didn't feel compelled to make the jump. If she really
| needed fast internet for some reason (maybe emailing an
| attachment) she would drive to the nearest library.
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| TIL AOL still offered dial-up internet.
|
| At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| TIL AOL still exists
| poisonarena wrote:
| I just made an AOL email address a few months ago and its not
| bad
| xunil2ycom wrote:
| Me, too.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Noooooo... Don't let the 90's end!
| empath75 wrote:
| When I worked at AOL about 10 years ago, dialup was _still_
| responsible for 100% of their profits. Literally every other
| part of the company lost money (Mapquest, AIM, Huffington Post,
| their ad network, etc). They were making literally billions of
| dollars from it and it was like 90+% profit margin or something
| absurd. It was like a single server running millions of virtual
| modems.
| trimbo wrote:
| Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people
| who were still using it in 2025!
| ecshafer wrote:
| I worked on a help desk from 2013-2016 for an MSP that served
| some rural telcos. A couple of the clients still offered dial-
| up internet, so there were a few hundred people with dial up at
| that point. They were largely people with very rural homes that
| they didn't even have DSL. They were largely older people. And
| they just made a steady profit, the equipment and lines
| basically just worked and they had a FAR lower rate of calls
| than the DSL, Cable, Fiber, etc customers.
| paulorlando wrote:
| Reminds me of how AT&T continued generating revenue from
| renting landline phones many years after it became legal to
| own and connect your own equipment to their network.
| busterarm wrote:
| I worked from 2011-2013 at a small regional ILEC that had
| some dialup customers.
|
| Yeah it largely just worked.
| smelendez wrote:
| I'm curious what those customers do today. Are they still
| using those computers with antique web browsers?
|
| Maybe email and Amazon are enough, though.
| unquietwiki wrote:
| I've got in-laws that use 12yo Macs; would not surprise me
| in the least if a lot of older folks were still using
| whatever box from Best Buy or a relative they got in the
| late 00s.
| const_cast wrote:
| Judging from how Amazon loads now on modern speeds, I'm
| guessing Amazon is out of the question.
|
| Email should be fine... as long as you don't use a web
| client.
| themadturk wrote:
| My mom, who used dialup as recently as 2019 (not AOL) used
| it almost exclusively for email...Gmail's simple interface.
| She had a very active group of email correspondents, but
| Gmail on Chrome was her only need.
| tharne wrote:
| The NYT is not looking so hot in the 21st century. They lost a
| ton of credibility during the Bush administration for their
| cheerleading in the run up to the Iraq. When our allies were
| claiming (correctly) that Iraq did not have any WMDs, where was
| the "newspaper of record"?
|
| Then, they failed to investigate what turned out to be very
| credible reports of Presidents Biden's cognitive decline,
| despite the fact that any normal person watching Biden on TV
| could tell something was amiss.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| They also do a massive amount of credible, in-depth reporting
| and while they deserve criticism where it is due, I can't
| believe the eagerness that some display to throw the baby out
| with the bathwater.
| tharne wrote:
| It's not a matter of throwing the baby out with the
| bathwater, it's the fundamental fact that trust takes a
| lifetime to build and a moment to lose.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| A baby takes nine months to make and a moment to throw
| out a window. Shall we keep on with analogies?
|
| I disagree it takes "a moment" for a large, multiperson
| organization to lose all credibility due to occasional
| editorial lapses.
|
| Or maybe it's because I think trust in reputable
| organizations is the only thing binding society together
| from crumbling into an AI social media abyss, that I
| refuse to declare NYTs credibility dead.
|
| Heck, I still support the WSJ news section even though
| they're owned by an enabler of the current
| administration.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I have now seen multiple articles about this and none of them
| talked about how much use it was actually getting today, which
| I have found disappointing.
|
| Not sure why none that I have seen have been any better.
| smelendez wrote:
| It sounds like AOL won't disclose that information and the
| only national survey anyone has cited doesn't distinguish by
| ISP.
| pwenzel wrote:
| I also want to hear from the people who still maintain AOL in
| 2025!
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Almost certainly older people living in remote areas who login
| to the AOL to check the email box for pictures of the
| grandkids.
| bityard wrote:
| At this point, it would not surprise me if there was a very
| small but very enthusiastic community of retro computing
| enthusiasts with AOL accounts.
| layer8 wrote:
| Previous discussion two days ago, 101 comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843369
| drittich wrote:
| For younger users of the internet, it's hard to overstate how
| omnipresent the AOL brand was. The marketing team was on
| overdrive, all the time. And their marketing CDs probably caused
| a noticeable increase in CD-ROM adoption.
| throwawayoldie wrote:
| They also disrupted the coaster industry by constantly mailing
| out free ones.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| Also the scarecrow industry. I recall people hanging CDs in
| their garden, as the sun reflecting off them as they moved in
| the breeze would scare away crows.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| What did those CD's actually contain? A browser with some
| firmware?
| achandlerwhite wrote:
| lol no.
|
| They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking
| drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for
| consumers yet.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| Yep. When we started an ISP about 1994, we gave the users a
| floppy that installed Trumpet Winsock, Netscape, and a
| handful of other programs for things like IRC and Usenet.
| Trumpet Winsock provided the dialup and networking which
| Windows 3.1 didn't have. AOL would have had to provide
| something similar, though all custom for connecting to
| their network.
| chasd00 wrote:
| The desktop client had something like a browser. iirc you
| could get to the Internet but it was like AOL's version of
| the Internet. There was a keyword based search but I think
| websites had to register specific keywords with AOL or
| something like that to show up. The big thing with AOL was
| the "you've got mail!" sound once you connected. That voice
| was like a pop-culture meme back then.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It wasn't a browser by any modern sense of the word early
| on. All of the graphics were on the disk to reduce load
| time.
| oniony wrote:
| Don't forget the browser toolbar.
| jandrese wrote:
| They predated the web browser by several years. Even once
| they added a browser a lot of people didn't have computers
| powerful enough to run them. Netscape for example needed 8MB
| of RAM, which was a lot in the early 90s. Plus back then the
| Web wasn't nearly as dominant. A lot of discussion happened
| on the Usenet, which AOL also provided access to much to the
| chagrin of the existing Usenet users. Email of course was
| also huge. Mostly it was expected that you would stay within
| the walled garden of AOL's service, using the keywords in
| their fat client to load topics of interest. More like a
| corporate version of a BBS.
| gstrike wrote:
| And before they started sending the free CDs they would send
| 3.5" floppies! Need a another floppy disk? It was just a phone
| call and format away! Shipped!
| pflenker wrote:
| I remember a campaign to collect aol cds, which were a 90s form
| of physical spam, so that they can be dumped in front of their
| headquarters. I eagerly asked all my friends and family to pick
| up as many aol cds as they can and hand them to me. I missed a
| couple crucial details (as an excuse I was quite young): a) CDs
| are heavy, b) the headquarters aren't even in Germany so I
| would have to send the CDs overseas, c) shipping heavy stuff is
| expensive, d) it's easier to spread the word to everyone that
| they should collect stuff for you than it is to tell them to
| stop.
|
| Took me a long while to get rid of all of them.
| jonbiggums22 wrote:
| The floppies were actually a bounty since they were
| rewritable unlike the CDs. I remember the tech guy at our
| school was given about a pallet of them to hand out to kids,
| which he instead kept in his office reached for when he
| needed to copy that floppy.
| layer8 wrote:
| Also: ("net.wars: The Making of an Underclass: AOL")
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110505003755/http://www.nyupre...
| chasd00 wrote:
| > hard to overstate how omnipresent the AOL brand was
|
| you could find AOL cds and floppies on the side of the road.
| They were everywhere.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I don't think I ever bought a floppy disk for keeping things
| on during their mailing campaign.
| dimator wrote:
| Magazines had their CDs tucked inside, sometimes 2 of them!
| What a time.
| js2 wrote:
| I mean, it got itself written into a major motion picture:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ve_Got_Mail
|
| A few years back I was pacing a marathon and toward the end it
| was just me and a recent college graduate. Something caused me
| to mention AOL and she hadn't heard of it. I mentioned CD-ROMs
| and she said: "you mean, like for music?". She had no idea what
| CD-ROMs were. So that's was from someone born in maybe 1995?
| It's amazing how something that was as ubiquitous as AOL (and
| it _was_ ubiquitous) can come and go in a single generation.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed, and it kicked off a race of ISPs seeking to emulate. I
| probably had a dozen Blue Light (not to be confused with Blu-
| Ray) internet discs from K-Mart back in the day
| ufmace wrote:
| At least when they were blasting floppy disks with their
| software everywhere, it was actually useful. Anyone even
| remotely interested in computer stuff could easily accumulate
| dozens of them without even trying. Just format 'em and they'd
| work fine for making copies of all the things that needed 5-10
| disks to install.
| jandrese wrote:
| And for people on the Internet every waking moment of their
| lives it's hard to explain how people got by at the insane
| price points those services had. AOL for example gave you _5
| hours_ of dialup time per month. They billed by the minute.
| Every additional hour cost you $1. And they exploded in
| popularity because that was a far better price than their
| competitors (GEnie, Compuserv, Prodigy, etc...)
|
| Once internet ISPs entered the scene offering unlimited
| unfiltered Internet for $20/month all of those services were
| doomed.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I got 600 hours free with a copy of Chex Quest (DooM reskin for
| kids) in a box of cereal.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| I FORGOT ABOUT CHEX QUEST
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest
| freedomben wrote:
| Oh dude, I played _a ton_ of Chex Quest back in the day. They
| did a really good job with implementation there. Honestly, an
| utterly brilliant marketing plan because to this day I still
| have major warm vibes for Chex brand. Wish they 'd up the
| protein to carb ratio a bit though so I could eat it in good
| conscience :-)
| Minor49er wrote:
| But do you remember the Mr. Pibb first-person shooter?
|
| https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-
| the-3d-interactiv...
| gwbas1c wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250811145846/https://www.nytim...
| st_goliath wrote:
| So, eternal September is now officially coming to an end?
| busterarm wrote:
| AOL pulled the plug on usenet access 20 years ago.
| tomxor wrote:
| > Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second
|
| Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was
| 56 kilo _bits_ per second. That 's about 6.8 kilobytes, but
| realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.
| icedchai wrote:
| On top of that, almost nobody _actually_ connected at 56K. You
| needed a perfect phone line. Still, compression did help a bit.
| Dialup latency sucked though. It was 100 's of milliseconds.
|
| I had a friend with a 56K ISDN line (data over voice channel)
| and it was much better performance (10's of milliseconds.)
| varispeed wrote:
| I remember connecting at 56K. I couldn't afford real 56K
| modem, but there were cheaper ones that offloaded
| communication to the CPU. When parents weren't home I was
| rewiring the socket to connect my modem. So not ideal, but
| worked. Explaining high bills was fun.
| icedchai wrote:
| You may have connected at 56K, but it was rare to see in
| practice. I worked for an ISP and we could see all the
| stats. We had Ascend Max equipment. To add further
| confusion, your modem may have been reporting the _serial
| port_ rate, not the actual _line_ rate.
| varispeed wrote:
| Makes sense. Just like today my phone shows 5G and full
| bars, but is as slow as dial up.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yes! Also, early ISPs were often massively over
| subscribed. They might have fractional T1 line coming
| into a POP (example: 384Kbit line) with 100 modems off of
| it. At peak times, you not only got busy signals, but
| when you did get through, a slow connection because that
| upstream pipe was full...
| kstrauser wrote:
| Same here. I lived in the middle of nowhere but somehow
| surprisingly close to a remote CO, and I could regularly
| get 44Kbps connections. My friends were envious.
|
| My "favorite" thing when working tech support was
| explaining to people in expensive new subdivisions that
| Southwest Bell saved money by deploying pair gains
| instead of running more copper, and that's why they were
| never, ever going to see more than 33.6 (if very lucky)
| or 28.8 (more likely).
|
| A common trick was to get them to add 3 commas to their
| dial string. That would prevent their modem from starting
| to train up until 3 seconds after they finished dialing.
| That would give our modems time to answer and start the
| 56K initiation. The delay would cause them to miss that,
| and then start trying to train up a much more stable 33.6
| connection. It capped their max speed but made their
| connection a lot more reliable.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| I lived in the country with pretty poor phone lines, so
| I'd send my 56k modem a command to limit it to 19.2. If
| it tried to train up to 28.8, there would be so many bad
| blocks it'd grind to a stop with all the retransmits
| until it dropped back to 19.2 anyway, so locking it there
| worked best.
| jandrese wrote:
| IIRC connecting to the PSTN the best you would ever see was
| 48kbps, at least in the states, although if you were
| transferring uncompressed data in the clear sometimes the
| modem could compress it for you on the fly to get more data
| on the wire. In practice though big files tended to be
| compressed already so you rarely saw much benefit from
| that. You needed some sort of closed phone network that
| didn't compress the voice channel the way the phone company
| did in order for the modems to negotiate up to the max.
| belthesar wrote:
| With my v.92 soft modem, I was able to regularly connect at
| 48k, and sometimes 53.3k. I never connected at theoretical
| max of 56k.
|
| Worthwhile to also mention that ISDN was full duplex, instead
| of half-duplex like dialup. The modems on either end would
| need to time-slice to allow bi-directional communication,
| which in a TCP laden world like the web meant that every
| interaction was orders of magnitude more latent than on ISDN,
| in which you had symmetrical, full-duplex 56k of bandwidth
| between you and the ISDN modem. That's the biggest reason why
| you had a significant decrease in latency.
| icedchai wrote:
| I also vaguely remember there being FCC power limitations
| on (some?) 56K modems, limiting them to ~53K max. Also,
| even with a 56K connection, upload speeds were still
| limited to 33.6K max.
|
| Fortunately, I got cable internet around 1997 and never
| looked back.
| chasd00 wrote:
| my earliest recollection was 14.4 then came 28.8 then 33.3 and
| finally 56kbps. In college, mide-late 90s, if we wanted Inet
| access from our dorm we had to use dial-up but if we went to
| the lab we could get on the T1 (1.5mbps) which i think was
| shared with the whole campus. iirc my campus connected to UT-
| Austin and then they had a T3 (45mbps) to the Internet.
| ..something like that
| freedomben wrote:
| Heh, some great memories using the T1 line at the school. In
| the wild west days we Napster'ed at extreme speeds before
| someone narked us out 8-)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My friend would queue up downloads on his laptop before 1st
| period, leave the laptop plugged in, sitting in a desk
| drawer, and pick it up at the end of the day. He had a CD
| burner, and if we gave him blank media he would burn us his
| current collection, alphabetized by artist. I still have
| one CD from that (labeled "Chris Rock" to "Gravity Kills"),
| that might be the most 1990s thing I own.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| I remember getting 5.2 KB/s downloading the Worms 2 demo from
| Tucows and could practically feel the wind in my hair screaming
| down the information superhighway...
| neuralRiot wrote:
| I remember spending ONE WEEK downloading windows 98. Younger
| generations will never know the fun of click-and-wait and the
| thrill of jpgs slowly loading.
| o11c wrote:
| It was very common to be limited to a significantly lower
| speed. Wikipedia sucks, so I dug up the actual v.34 standard:
| 33.6 kbit/s (a later addition) 31.2 kbit/s (a later
| addition) 28.8 kbit/s (the theoretical maximum for most
| people; I remember being jealous of people who actually got it)
| 26.4 kbit/s (what my internet usually hit in practice)
| 24.0 kbit/s (I remember seeing this) 21.6 kbit/s
| (apparently this was very common, though I don't remember
| seeing it) 19.2 kbit/s 16.8 kbit/s 14.4
| kbit/s (quite possible) (lower bitrates are also
| documented; this is all multiples of 2.4 kbit/s)
|
| Also, remember to assume about 10 bits per byte of actual data,
| since there is various protocol overhead.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Iirc, most copper lines had a 50kb cap, making 56kb modems
| liars.
| mcny wrote:
| I can't prove this but I somehow remember peaks of up to 48
| kilobits per second though never sustained.
|
| I remember being amazed to see download resume right in the
| browser even as late as 2009 (I was only on dial up u til
| about 2006).
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| IIRC limit isn't the copper, it's the CO interconnects with
| high/low frequency cutoffs, the same copper was used for
| 1.5Mbps synchronous DSL. For very short runs, 50Mbps VDSL
| hadlock wrote:
| > 28.8 kbit/s (the theoretical maximum)
|
| "56k" modems hit the scene (at affordable prices) in ~1998
| and 3.2-4.1KB/s were pretty normal. People in high school who
| "only" had a 28.8 modem were considered dinosaurs by then. We
| didn't get DSL until ~mid 2000 IIRC
| o11c wrote:
| It's not a matter of what the modems were capable of, it's
| a matter of what the phone line would and could actually
| carry. Maybe it would be different in a big city, but I
| don't think I _ever_ saw anybody get over 33.6 before
| upgrading to DSL.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 33.6 was the highest V.90 specified for output over an
| analog connection. ISPs would have a digital connection
| the phone company and the signal (ideally) would stay
| digital until it was turned analog to send over your
| local loop. This is why it was 33.6kbps up and 56kbps
| down. I believe the regulatory limit was 53kbps in the
| US, and it was not uncommon for my modem to negotiate
| something in the 40s, as we had a somewhat long local
| loop (hence my RBOC denying us DSL; we had a local loop
| that was 2 "kilofeet" too long).
| imglorp wrote:
| Don't forget the first mass produced consumer modems were 300
| baud, and yes we're ignoring the model 37 teletype at 120
| baud. Then 1200 baud came soon after for a huge improvement.
|
| Of course we're talking terminal, BBS, and Compuserve users
| here. AOL was probably grief at those speeds.
| Hobadee wrote:
| I remember being _SOOOO_ jealous of my buddy, cause their
| family got a 28.8 modem! (We were stuck on 16k at the time,
| IIRC)
| pragma_x wrote:
| That's how I remember it.
|
| For completeness, 33.6 required insane levels of signal
| clarity on the phone line, and was mostly fiction outside of
| urban and dense suburban areas.
|
| Prior to 14.4k, there were other generations of modems that
| came before: 9600, 2400, and even 300 baud modems were all
| you could get in their respective eras. Each of which were
| cutting edge at the time.
|
| 56K (also called V.90 or "V.everything"), leaned into the
| quantization that happens on digital phone trunks, rather
| than let the analog-to-digital conversion chew up your analog
| modem waveforms. The trick here is that the psuedo-digital-
| over-analog leg from your house to the local exchange was
| limited by a few miles. Try this from too far out of town,
| and it just doesn't work. And to be clear, this was prior to
| DSL, which is similar but a completely different beast.
|
| Oh, and the V.90 spec was a compromise between two competing
| 56K standards at the time: K56Flex and X2. This meant that
| ISPs needed to have matching modems on their end to handle
| the special 56K signaling. Miraculously, the hardware vendors
| did something that was good for everyone and compromised on a
| single standard, and then pushed firmware patches that
| allowed the two brands to interoperate on existing hardware.
|
| Also, line conditions were subject to a range of factors.
| It's all copper wire hung from power-poles after all. So,
| poor quality materials, sloppy workmanship, and aging
| infrastructure would introduce noise all by itself, and even
| during weather events. This meant that, for some, it was
| either a good day or a bad day to try to dial into the
| internet.
| icedchai wrote:
| My first modem was 1200... In the early 90's, I got a 9600
| baud modem, which is where it felt like things were really
| taking off. A whole page of text in less than a couple of
| seconds! I ran my own BBS on 9600 for years.
| Hobadee wrote:
| Also, 56kbps was the _MAX POSSIBLE_ speed. 48kbps was the
| maximum speed I ever remember seeing, with somewhere around
| 42kbps being more common. Occasionally I would connect at
| 36kbps, see the speed, hang up and try again.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| This reminded me of BBS'[1], which again reminded me of the older
| days where you sent letters and got one back a week or three
| later.
|
| I had programmed a lot in Delphi before I started programming in
| C++, and the orders of magnitude slower build times caused me to
| program very differently.
|
| I would re-read several times and reason much more about my code
| before issuing a build command. Whereas in Delphi, the almost
| instantaneous builds meant I used it almost like a spell checker.
|
| Back in the BBS days you left a message and checked back in a
| day.
|
| Perhaps its rose tinted glasses I've got on but I feel todays
| instantaneous communication isn't always for the better.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
| da02 wrote:
| Any thoughts on using Rust, Go, or Zig?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Been tempted to try Zig. Rust made my head hurt just looking
| at it.
|
| A bit incidental though, I was mainly romanticizing
| communicating more slowly and deliberately.
| gamache wrote:
| Pour one out, RIP to a real one.
|
| In the early 00's, I used the CDs for free internet access on
| vacation. There was a local dialup number ~wherever you were and
| it was plenty fine for email and browsing the web of the time,
| and as long as you cancelled within a month, it didn't cost a
| cent.
| da02 wrote:
| In case you have elderly relatives and T-mobile is available in
| your area, it might be useful to contact T-Mobile (via X.com or
| retail service) and ask for the "Basic Mobile Internet 30GB" plan
| (Service Order Code: MI30TI or MI30TE) It is $10/month for 30GB
| with auto-pay. Then get an unlocked phone and put in the T-Mobile
| Sim card and activate the hotspot (or via USB tethering since
| Wifi is too complicated for them). Although, I am not sure how
| you would limit the speed down to 56k to prevent them from going
| over the 30GB limit.
| jandrese wrote:
| The caveat with this is that many people on dialup are the ones
| who live too far from civilization to get cell coverage. The
| only reason they have phone service at all is government
| incentives in the mid 20th century.
| coolspot wrote:
| For that case, Starlink is $10/m for 10GB, $50/m for 50GB or
| $80/m for unlimited (fixed location).
| yonaguska wrote:
| I used it in boarding school as a proxy tunnel that actually
| worked. It was too slow to do anything useful, but, I had bought
| napoleon total war, and the network blocked whatever DRM it was
| using to allow me to play. I ended up bypassing it by simply
| using an aol disc. I ended up pirating the game I had paid for
| later simply bc it was too much of a pain to keep using AOL.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat.
|
| My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about
| 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail
| (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now
| anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time
| while all the graphic assets got cached.
|
| Some years later she was on a cell network connection with
| 128kbps fallback if you go over your limit. Hey, 4x as fast as
| she had before, effectively unlimited right? Wrong. Bloat was by
| now such that sites simply wouldn't load at 128kbps. Things timed
| out before all the bloat was loaded and you would not get the UI
| regardless how patient you were.
|
| Hacker News still worked of course.
| jonbiggums22 wrote:
| Had a similar experience. I grew up in a rural area and
| broadband penetration was late. Later when I bought a house I
| was lied to by comcast about availability and ended up dialup
| again. (My fault for believing them tbh) Most of the tricks I
| used to make the most out of a dialup connection (disable
| images, disable flash player, load multiple pages so they could
| be browsed offline) didn't make a difference anymore. In the
| case of loading multiple pages, lazy loading meant this didn't
| really work. It was a much more brutal experience than the
| first go around.
|
| The worst part was how little actual content actually makes up
| the bloat. Sure video was right out, but I was often struggling
| to load pages that were mostly text.
|
| The only other option at the time was Hugesnet. After doing the
| math I determined the data caps were so low dialup was actually
| cheaper at MBs/month and had less latency issues. Realistically
| the next best available step up wasn't Hughesnet it was
| shotgunned 56K.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| A firm I used to do network work for had Hughesnet as
| failover Internet for a couple locations. I always knew they
| were on it by the 500ms+ pings. Better than nothing though
| for sure. And I'd also believe that's typical of any non-
| Starlink Internet around the end of the 2010s.
| jandrese wrote:
| To be fair when you are put on the 128kbps penalty box with the
| cell provider they also de-prioritize your traffic to the very
| very bottom of the queue so it's almost impossible to even get
| the 128kbps, and if the network is busy at all you often get
| nothing.
|
| but you are correct that modern web frequently leaves low
| bandwidth high latency users out in the cold, but there are a
| few holdouts. Craigslist is still pretty usable for example.
| Hackernews is quite bandwidth friendly. Email is always an
| option. It's not all doom and gloom for the soda straw crowd.
| Hobadee wrote:
| > Email is always an option
|
| Provided you have Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever set up
| on your computer. That's beyond most grandmothers, who are
| likely logging into Yahoo or MSN or something.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| This was rural though, with the cell tower serving a small
| town, population 600, and folks on the highway and in the
| nearby backcountry. As far as we could tell it really was
| 128kbps. But definitely not enough for the modern (then -
| this is already 7-8 years ago) web.
|
| We ran out the (then) measly data allotment of the day
| (500MB) on purpose on the last day of the billing period to
| try this.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And the only reason she doesn't have access to higher bandwidth
| is because rural America and conservatives consistently vote
| for politicians who cut funding for it....
|
| Whether she voted for it or not, she should blame her neighbors
| who voted for her representatives.
| lousken wrote:
| Downloading 200MB Windows 98 update was the adrenaline back then.
| freedomben wrote:
| For me it was downloading mp3 files and only letting Winamp
| play them on repeat as they download. At first you just got a
| second or two of sound, and it would add maybe a second on each
| play. Eventually the magic of compound interest would get you
| the whole song, and that was a major adrenaline rush
| jlarocco wrote:
| As much crap as AOL used to get, there's not much difference
| between their chat in 1996 and Teams and Slack now. And it
| managed to do it with 8 Mb of RAM over a 14.4k modem. Of course
| it didn't have video, but the group chat itself was basically the
| same.
|
| In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.
| Hobadee wrote:
| Except that the AIM protocol was reverse-enginnereed and you
| could then use a single client (GAIM/Pidgeon, Trillian) to talk
| to all your friends. The protocols nowadays are so locked down
| that there has yet to be a decent 3rd party implementation.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Loved Trillian
| burntwater wrote:
| The sound effects were way better back then. "You've got
| mail!". The doors opening/closing.
|
| Though maybe it's different because back then, then meant
| someone I wanted to interact with was now available.
|
| Today, a chat sound means someone I probably don't want to, but
| am required to, interact with is now available.
| tombert wrote:
| A small part of me has debated artificially limiting my internet
| speeds to 56k, to see how well I could _actually_ live with dial-
| up speeds.
|
| If I did everything with w3m and Mutt and whatnot, I could see
| myself living almost comfortably.
| throwzasdf wrote:
| Enable Chrome Developer Tools, you can choose the simulated
| speed to test.
| tombert wrote:
| yeah but that wouldn't work with Mutt and w3m.
| 1024core wrote:
| I remember a few years (OK, more than a few) ago, ATT decided to
| discontinue renting out touchtone phones. It seems once upon a
| time, people paid ATT something like $5/mo to rent this new-
| fangled "touch tone" technology. And there were like a million
| people in California regularly paying ATT (or PacBell or whoever
| inherited ATTs customers) $60/year to rent a phone that you could
| buy outright for $10 in your local Walgreens or Walmart.
| xunil2ycom wrote:
| To be fair, that was a holdover from when AT&T held a monopoly
| on phones via Western Electric. Some folks probably just didn't
| bother changing out their phone after the divestiture.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It used to violate your customer agreement with ma bell to
| connect any personally owned equipment to the phone lines.
|
| My first phone was a bakelite pulse-dialing phone that had the
| ringer clipped, because they used to measure the number of
| extensions by the resistance on the ringer circuit (this was
| well after that requirement was quashed by the courts, but it
| was a phone I inherited).
| xunil2ycom wrote:
| The article mentions AOL CDs being ubiquitous. I remember the 3.5
| in floppies before the CDs. At least one could put something in
| the write protect hole and reformat them. The CDs ended up as so
| much garbage.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| I wish they could mail this article on a free CD behind a
| paywall...
| pcdoodle wrote:
| The killer feature of dialup these days would be email. Let it
| connect, download the attachments, free up the phone line.
| tech234a wrote:
| Still available from MSN for the time being: https://get.msn.com/
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