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AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

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Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#141

Post by aidenn0 »

o11c wrote: post #122
hadlock wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

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.

33.6 was the highest V.90 specified for output over an analog connection. ISPs would have a digital connection the phone company and the signal (ideally) would stay digital until it was turned analog to send over your local loop. This is why it was 33.6kbps up and 56kbps down. I believe the regulatory limit was 53kbps in the US, and it was not uncommon for my modem to negotiate something in the 40s, as we had a somewhat long local loop (hence my RBOC denying us DSL; we had a local loop that was 2 "kilofeet" too long).

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#142

Post by aidenn0 »

freedomben wrote: post #72
chasd00 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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-)

My friend would queue up downloads on his laptop before 1st period, leave the laptop plugged in, sitting in a desk drawer, and pick it up at the end of the day. He had a CD burner, and if we gave him blank media he would burn us his current collection, alphabetized by artist. I still have one CD from that (labeled "Chris Rock" to "Gravity Kills"), that might be the most 1990s thing I own.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#143

Post by aidenn0 »

1024core wrote: post #103

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 Wal…

It used to violate your customer agreement with ma bell to connect any personally owned equipment to the phone lines.

My first phone was a bakelite pulse-dialing phone that had the ringer clipped, because they used to measure the number of extensions by the resistance on the ringer circuit (this was well after that requirement was quashed by the courts, but it was a phone I inherited).

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#144

Post by Melatonic »

Hobadee wrote: post #119
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.

Loved Trillian

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#145

Post by clint »

londons_explore wrote: post #21
clint wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

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

You'll notice I didn't mention dialup at all in my comment.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#146

Post by icedchai »

pragma_x wrote: post #123
o11c wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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"),…

My first modem was 1200... In the early 90's, I got a 9600 baud modem, which is where it felt like things were really taking off. A whole page of text in less than a couple of seconds! I ran my own BBS on 9600 for years.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#147

Post by burntwater »

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.

The sound effects were way better back then. "You've got mail!". The doors opening/closing.

Though maybe it's different because back then, then meant someone I wanted to interact with was now available.

Today, a chat sound means someone I probably don't want to, but am required to, interact with is now available.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#148

Post by icedchai »

fapjacks wrote: post #126
jonbiggums22 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I've done modem calls over VOIP. Any connection above 2400 is incredibly unstable for the reasons you describe.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#149

Post by neuralRiot »

pixelpoet wrote: post #61
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.

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...

I remember spending ONE WEEK downloading windows 98. Younger generations will never know the fun of click-and-wait and the thrill of jpgs slowly loading.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#150

Post by themadturk »

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.

My mom, who used dialup as recently as 2019 (not AOL) used it almost exclusively for email...Gmail's simple interface. She had a very active group of email correspondents, but Gmail on Chrome was her only need.
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