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.
jandrese · 1h ago
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.
MarkusWandel · 26m ago
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.
Hobadee · 1h ago
> 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.
jonbiggums22 · 3h ago
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.
scarface_74 · 16m ago
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.
tomxor · 4h ago
> Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second
Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilobits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.
o11c · 3h ago
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.
pragma_x · 1h ago
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.
imglorp · 1h ago
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.
hadlock · 2h ago
> 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 · 1h ago
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.
Hobadee · 1h ago
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)
sandworm101 · 2h ago
Iirc, most copper lines had a 50kb cap, making 56kb modems liars.
mcny · 2h ago
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).
icedchai · 3h ago
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.)
belthesar · 30m ago
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.
varispeed · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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.
kstrauser · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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.
varispeed · 2h ago
Makes sense. Just like today my phone shows 5G and full bars, but is as slow as dial up.
icedchai · 2h ago
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...
jandrese · 1h ago
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.
pixelpoet · 3h ago
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...
Hobadee · 1h ago
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.
chasd00 · 3h ago
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 · 3h ago
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-)
trimbo · 5h ago
Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!
ecshafer · 4h ago
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 · 4h ago
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.
smelendez · 3h ago
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 · 2h ago
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.
busterarm · 4h ago
I worked from 2011-2013 at a small regional ILEC that had some dialup customers.
Yeah it largely just worked.
nerdjon · 4h ago
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 · 3h ago
It sounds like AOL won’t disclose that information and the only national survey anyone has cited doesn’t distinguish by ISP.
Workaccount2 · 3h ago
Almost certainly older people living in remote areas who login to the AOL to check the email box for pictures of the grandkids.
bityard · 47m ago
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.
pwenzel · 4h ago
I also want to hear from the people who still maintain AOL in 2025!
tharne · 4h ago
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.
1024core · 1h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
drittich · 4h ago
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.
pflenker · 4h ago
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 · 3h ago
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.
jandrese · 1h ago
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.
throwawayoldie · 4h ago
They also disrupted the coaster industry by constantly mailing out free ones.
aaronbaugher · 3h ago
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.
chasd00 · 3h ago
> 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.
dimator · 1h ago
Magazines had their CDs tucked inside, sometimes 2 of them! What a time.
lo_zamoyski · 2h ago
I don't think I ever bought a floppy disk for keeping things on during their mailing campaign.
ufmace · 2h ago
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.
js2 · 3h ago
I mean, it got itself written into a major motion picture:
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.
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
TechDebtDevin · 4h ago
What did those CD's actually contain? A browser with some firmware?
jandrese · 1h ago
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.
achandlerwhite · 4h ago
lol no.
They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.
chasd00 · 3h ago
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 · 11m ago
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.
aaronbaugher · 4h ago
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.
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.
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.
da02 · 4h ago
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 · 1h ago
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 · 55m ago
For that case, Starlink is $10/m for 10GB, $50/m for 50GB or $80/m for unlimited (fixed location).
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.
st_goliath · 4h ago
So, eternal September is now officially coming to an end?
busterarm · 4h ago
AOL pulled the plug on usenet access 20 years ago.
jonathaneunice · 5h ago
TIL AOL still offered dial-up internet.
At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.
dfedbeef · 4h ago
TIL AOL still exists
xunil2ycom · 1h ago
Me, too.
poisonarena · 2h ago
I just made an AOL email address a few months ago and its not bad
JKCalhoun · 3h ago
Noooooo... Don't let the 90's end!
empath75 · 1h ago
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.
xunil2ycom · 1h ago
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.
tombert · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
Enable Chrome Developer Tools, you can choose the simulated speed to test.
tombert · 1h ago
yeah but that wouldn't work with Mutt and w3m.
yonaguska · 4h ago
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.
jlarocco · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
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.
unethical_ban · 4h ago
I got 600 hours free with a copy of Chex Quest (DooM reskin for kids) in a box of cereal.
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 :-)
hopelite · 5h ago
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?
torgoguys · 4h ago
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 · 4h ago
What type of business was it? Consulting?
torgoguys · 3h ago
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 · 4h ago
There are still a lot of people without access to broadband, or with only one provider which may be expensive.
Starlink is definitely increasing availability but it's somewhat expensive.
xunil2ycom · 1h ago
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.
imzadi · 4h ago
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 · 4h ago
Starlink is so much more expensive though, more than a lot of people in rural areas can afford.
jonbiggums22 · 3h ago
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 · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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 · 58m ago
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.
clint · 4h ago
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 · 4h ago
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
morkalork · 4h ago
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.
jlokier · 4h ago
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
jandrese · 1h ago
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.
dbbr · 3h ago
5+ minutes for 8.8.8.8 to respond to a ping! Or am I reading this incorrectly?
nemomarx · 4h ago
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
codazoda · 4h ago
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.
yladiz · 4h ago
In very rural places, they may only have edge or 3g at best, if they have any connection.
clint · 4h ago
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.
Spivak · 3h ago
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.
MDGeist · 3h ago
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.
londons_explore · 4h ago
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 · 4h ago
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 · 4h ago
Are they wrong?
InitialLastName · 4h ago
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 · 55m ago
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.
Supermancho · 4h ago
Yes
scarface_74 · 4h ago
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
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 · 4h ago
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.
toast0 · 2h ago
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.
protocolture · 4h ago
>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 · 2h ago
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.
johnwheeler · 4h ago
Senior citizens who don’t know any better and never upgraded.then in their 50s now in their 70-80s.
lousken · 3h ago
Downloading 200MB Windows 98 update was the adrenaline back then.
freedomben · 3h ago
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
pcdoodle · 1h ago
The killer feature of dialup these days would be email. Let it connect, download the attachments, free up the phone line.
whoomp12342 · 1h ago
I wish they could mail this article on a free CD behind a paywall...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whether she voted for it or not, she should blame her neighbors who voted for her representatives.
Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilobits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.
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.
Of course we're talking terminal, BBS, and Compuserve users here. AOL was probably grief at those speeds.
"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
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).
I had a friend with a 56K ISDN line (data over voice channel) and it was much better performance (10's of milliseconds.)
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.
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.
Maybe email and Amazon are enough, though.
Yeah it largely just worked.
Not sure why none that I have seen have been any better.
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.
Took me a long while to get rid of all of them.
Once internet ISPs entered the scene offering unlimited unfiltered Internet for $20/month all of those services were doomed.
you could find AOL cds and floppies on the side of the road. They were everywhere.
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.
They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.
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
A bit incidental though, I was mainly romanticizing communicating more slowly and deliberately.
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.
At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.
If I did everything with w3m and Mutt and whatnot, I could see myself living almost comfortably.
In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-the-3d-interactiv...
Does anyone know?
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.
https://www.benton.org/blog/more-third-americans-have-access...
Starlink is definitely increasing availability but it's somewhat expensive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those are the kinda places I imagine are expensive to run new installs to, so it's really phone lines or satellite
Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and they don't really care that its not true.
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…
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.
OTOH, maybe shutting down AOL dialup helps Verizon drop its landline business. All the ILECs seem to be in a race to eliminate landlines.
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.
You can probably do it all on AWS with no physical infra.