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).
nosioptar · 8m 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.
chrisco255 · 2m 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.
dzhiurgis · 4m ago
Is dial up still at 56kbps?
ack_complete · 21m 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.
Thanks for making that! Boy is that more annoying than I remembered.
twilightzone · 5m 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 · 40m ago
I wonder how quickly you can load some of the modern, popular, websites on a dial up connection.
smelendez · 32s 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 · 32m ago
This orange site is fine but I wouldn’t hold my breath on any others
donio · 12m ago
Easy to see for yourself using the throttling option in the developer tools of popular browsers.
sugarpimpdorsey · 3m ago
We have a whole generation of programmers that will justify 12MB of JavaScript bundles to output "Hello world".
BobbyTables2 · 31m ago
Page loading times would probably be measurable with a sundial or calendar.
freitasm · 23m 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..."
JoshTriplett · 27m ago
Are there any sources indicating how many users dial-up still had?
orthecreedence · 10m 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.
I wonder if AOL will stop charging people on dial-up only, or if they will later claim "oops, sorry..."
And a video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpMrTxMV6E4