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AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

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Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#131

Post by belthesar »

icedchai wrote: post #55
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.

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.)

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#132

Post by MarkusWandel »

jandrese wrote: post #105
MarkusWandel wrote: post #56

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…

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…

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#133

Post by scarface_74 »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #56

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…

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#134

Post by scarface_74 »

chasd00 wrote: post #63
achandlerwhite wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol no. They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.

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.

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#136

Post by unethical_ban »

tharne wrote: post #39
trimbo wrote: post #4

Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!

[flagged]

They also do a massive amount of credible, in-depth reporting and while they deserve criticism where it is due, I can't believe the eagerness that some display to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#137

Post by tharne »

unethical_ban wrote: post #136
tharne wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

They also do a massive amount of credible, in-depth reporting and while they deserve criticism where it is due, I can't believe the eagerness that some display to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It's not a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it's the fundamental fact that trust takes a lifetime to build and a moment to lose.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#138

Post by const_cast »

smelendez wrote: post #70
ecshafer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

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.

Judging from how Amazon loads now on modern speeds, I'm guessing Amazon is out of the question.

Email should be fine... as long as you don't use a web client.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#139

Post by unethical_ban »

tharne wrote: post #137
unethical_ban wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also do a massive amount of credible, in-depth reporting and while they deserve criticism where it is due, I can't believe the eagerness that some display to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It's not a matter of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it's the fundamental fact that trust takes a lifetime to build and a moment to lose.

A baby takes nine months to make and a moment to throw out a window. Shall we keep on with analogies?

I disagree it takes "a moment" for a large, multiperson organization to lose all credibility due to occasional editorial lapses.

Or maybe it's because I think trust in reputable organizations is the only thing binding society together from crumbling into an AI social media abyss, that I refuse to declare NYTs credibility dead.

Heck, I still support the WSJ news section even though they're owned by an enabler of the current administration.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#140

Post by icedchai »

belthesar wrote: post #131
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.)

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…

I also vaguely remember there being FCC power limitations on (some?) 56K modems, limiting them to ~53K max. Also, even with a 56K connection, upload speeds were still limited to 33.6K max.

Fortunately, I got cable internet around 1997 and never looked back.

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