I'm surprised it's still being offered period! My parents live in a remote area outside of a rural town in one of the USA's smaller states, and even they haven't had dial-up in ~15 years. We grew up with dial-up until about 2010, when they switched over to (absolutely terrible) satellite internet. HughsNet, I think it was called. Two-ish years ago they switched over to Starlink and it's been working well (when it does work, anyway).
ack_complete · 43m ago
Apparently they just shut it down in 2024, but a couple of years ago I tested an Atari 1030 modem by dialing out to Earthlink, and it still worked -- successfully connected at 300 baud.
bobmcnamara · 17m ago
I worked somewhere with a small office run over Hughesnet. Some sort of upload-over-dial-up, broadband-download-over-satellite, with 1500ms latency for everything.
nosioptar · 30m ago
I know people just a couple hours from Seattle that still use dial up.
Most are older and don't want to spend the obscene prices for satellite, cellular signal isn't good enough out there.
nemomarx · 12m ago
The telecom hasn't tried to get them on DSL? There's subsidized low income programs for it (or where, idk what the status is now) so I can't imagine the cost was much higher. And if I were an ISP I might eat the cost of the upgrade just to avoid support complications for a small set of customers.
chrisco255 · 24m ago
I don't know how anyone can use the modern internet with dial up. It's got to be useless for all but email.
grishka · 7m ago
I'm sure HN is perfectly usable over dial-up as well.
nosioptar · 21m ago
I think that's basically what they use it for.
Sites that work well with lynx are OK on dial up.
dzhiurgis · 26m ago
Is dial up still at 56kbps?
chrisco255 · 16m ago
Yes. It's a hard limit for old phone lines because they're limited to something like 3.1 khz.
esseph · 19m ago
Still over the phone lines, so yep. Extremely lucky if you get that on old copper though.
nosioptar · 21m ago
As far as I know.
(I haven't personally had dial up in about 20 tears.)
danans · 7m ago
One wonders what the dial up ops department/team at AOL even looks like now. I wonder if it's anyone's full time job, or just something that occupies a fraction of their time.
apetresc · 19m ago
I didn't even know AOL was still around, let alone AOL dial-up.
800xl · 10m ago
I thought they were just a web portal and email service. It is amazing they still offered ISP services this long.
They had some pretty unscrupulous business practices back in the day with their free trial CD mailers. My cousin worked in their call center ages ago and would sometimes convince even people who didn't have a computer to pay for the service.
benchly · 15m ago
Do they still offer the floppies with the free hours? I need a new set of drink coasters.
Thanks for making that! Boy is that more annoying than I remembered.
twilightzone · 27m ago
That's subjective! I made a song with that sound in 1998. It was called "Net Pet" and it did pretty well on mp3.com.
loose-cannon · 1h ago
I wonder how quickly you can load some of the modern, popular, websites on a dial up connection.
grishka · 2m ago
No need to wonder, just end up in an old building with thick brick walls that are only penetrated by a weak 2G signal and try to load something on your phone.
sugarpimpdorsey · 25m ago
We have a whole generation of programmers that will justify 12MB of JavaScript bundles to output "Hello world".
No comments yet
philistine · 8m ago
You can test it yourself in the comfort of your gigabit connection. I wanted to test my barrage of very small images using lazy loading on a crappy connection. I learned that Chrome can easily pretend to suck. On Safari you somehow need to download a special tool but it works just as well.
Or as worse I guess.
smelendez · 22m ago
I’d bet a lot of them are using old computers too, with who knows what browser and OS. It’s probably hard to tell loading issues from rendering issues
derwiki · 54m ago
This orange site is fine but I wouldn’t hold my breath on any others
benchly · 9m ago
Something low-resource demand (like my blog) would probably be okay, save for a few large pics on some pages. Most people who run in the smolweb circles also like vintage computing, so creating webspaces using only HTML & CSS is common practice, which should do fine over a 56k connection.
donio · 34m ago
Easy to see for yourself using the throttling option in the developer tools of popular browsers.
BobbyTables2 · 53m ago
Page loading times would probably be measurable with a sundial or calendar.
freitasm · 45m ago
Some time ago there were estimates on the number of people still paying AOL but using a broadband service.
I wonder if AOL will stop charging people on dial-up only, or if they will later claim "oops, sorry..."
ricree · 21m ago
>This change will not affect any other benefits in your AOL plan, which you can access any time on your AOL plan dashboard. To manage or cancel your account, visit MyAccount
Sounds like everyone keeps getting charged, since this is technically part of their "AOL plan", whatever that actually includes.
0xy · 6m ago
Benefits such as virus protection for email that you don't use, and a free AOL Toolbar with shopping offers you don't have installed. Thank you for your $10 a month you forgot we were charging you for 15 years.
alex1138 · 3m ago
brrrrrrrrrrr
weeeeeeeeeee
kzzzzzzzzzzz
JoshTriplett · 49m ago
Are there any sources indicating how many users dial-up still had?
orthecreedence · 33m ago
When I worked at AOL in 2010, dialup was their biggest source of revenue still. It'd be interesting to see the drop-off since then. I imagine it's trending down pretty quick as the generation using it kicks the bucket.
Most are older and don't want to spend the obscene prices for satellite, cellular signal isn't good enough out there.
Sites that work well with lynx are OK on dial up.
(I haven't personally had dial up in about 20 tears.)
They had some pretty unscrupulous business practices back in the day with their free trial CD mailers. My cousin worked in their call center ages ago and would sometimes convince even people who didn't have a computer to pay for the service.
No comments yet
Or as worse I guess.
I wonder if AOL will stop charging people on dial-up only, or if they will later claim "oops, sorry..."
Sounds like everyone keeps getting charged, since this is technically part of their "AOL plan", whatever that actually includes.
weeeeeeeeeee
kzzzzzzzzzzz
And a video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpMrTxMV6E4