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AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

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Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#111

Post by jandrese »

varispeed wrote: post #83
icedchai wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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.

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#112

Post by xunil2ycom »

stetrain wrote: post #26
hopelite wrote: post #2

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?

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.

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#113

Post by Hobadee »

tomxor wrote: post #42

> 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.

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#114

Post by Hobadee »

o11c wrote: post #67
tomxor wrote: post #42

> 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.

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 ver…

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)

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#115

Post by jandrese »

drittich wrote: post #24

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.

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#116

Post by jandrese »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #30
drittich wrote: post #24

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.

What did those CD's actually contain? A browser with some firmware?

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#117

Post by jandrese »

da02 wrote: post #51

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).…

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#118

Post by empath75 »

jonathaneunice wrote: post #3

TIL AOL still offered dial-up internet. At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#119

Post by Hobadee »

jlarocco wrote: post #90

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.

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#120

Post by jandrese »

jlokier wrote: post #38
morkalork wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 tim…

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.

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