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).
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.
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.
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.
Intense nostalgia. It brings me back to a point in time where the world suddenly turned and the possibilities seemed limitless. And all of those possibilities looked a little more idealistic, and a little less mercenary than what we actually got.
Not that I'm really complaining. I do like what we got.
And curiously different from the AI revolution, where there are no pretensions of idealism at at all, and everyone clearly understands that whoever wins this time will quite literally own the entire world, if the plan succeeds. And that it won't be a pleasant or pretty world for the rest of us, and that all of the leading candidates for King of the Universe don't care at all that the rest of us will be discarded. The complete opposite, in that regard.
I shall have to break out my set of AOL CD drink coasters, and put songs from Camelot on permanent repeat in order to mark the passing of an age with the solemnity it deserves.
I wish we had gotten municipal fiber. Back when telecoms had to lease their lines the competition was great. Cable companies growing fat on outdated cable lines has held many of us back for too long.
My parents didn't have AOL when I was a kid; we had Prodigy, I think because they had promotions to get a cheap or free computer if you signed up for N years of Prodigy internet.
I was always kind of jealous of my friends who had AOL because I wanted the "You've Got Mail!" greeting, and I would see promotions that talk about "AOL Keywords" and I couldn't use those with Prodigy.
Amazing to think that AOL still offered dial-up service.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not possible anymore is many areas, where 2G and 3G networks have been shutdown to re-use spectrum for newer standards. The last time I was in a rural area with minimal signal strength, my phone was alternating between satellite-only messaging or 5G with 5-10 MB/s. I was actually able to download a movie in a quite reasonable amount of time, presumably because there wasn't anyone else doing much with the cell tower I was barely in range of.
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.
Readit News
Most are older and don't want to spend the obscene prices for satellite, cellular signal isn't good enough out there.
Not that I'm really complaining. I do like what we got.
And curiously different from the AI revolution, where there are no pretensions of idealism at at all, and everyone clearly understands that whoever wins this time will quite literally own the entire world, if the plan succeeds. And that it won't be a pleasant or pretty world for the rest of us, and that all of the leading candidates for King of the Universe don't care at all that the rest of us will be discarded. The complete opposite, in that regard.
I shall have to break out my set of AOL CD drink coasters, and put songs from Camelot on permanent repeat in order to mark the passing of an age with the solemnity it deserves.
I was always kind of jealous of my friends who had AOL because I wanted the "You've Got Mail!" greeting, and I would see promotions that talk about "AOL Keywords" and I couldn't use those with Prodigy.
Amazing to think that AOL still offered dial-up service.
And this version combining the graphic and the sound used to make the graphic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo
And this alternative version (h/t @Kye): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpMrTxMV6E4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF2v32xCD0Y
https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/c...
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.
Deleted Comment
A Google SERP with rich content: about 20 minutes
A typical Facebook post: ten minutes
CNN home page: half an hour
YouTube: forget it
This should be much faster, it was created for people with limited network access.
https://lite.cnn.com/
Or as worse I guess.
But im pretty sure the answer is really damn slow.
I always create an alias to make that sound and another for the matrix phone sound when I connect to the internet.
the sound files are available here: https://www.soundjay.com/dial-up-modem-sound-effect.html
for the matrix:
alias wifion="nmcli dev wifi connect 'wifi-name'" && paplay /path/to/soundfile/matrix-phone.wav
for the old dial up tones:
alias wifioff="nmcli d disconnect wlp3s0" && /path/to/soundfile/dial-up-modem-02.wav
linux has loads of these sounds in /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo