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AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

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Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#231

Post by MrDOS »

childintime wrote: post #198
MarkusWandel wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am on a real "unlimited" 128kbps plan on my phone. I use Firefox and ublock, so a lot of bloat is avoided. The bank app with its simple screens loads with much difficulty. Of course, it's a bank. Most sites load, just give it time. I give up on graphics mostly. YouTube works admirably well. But I agree it is a tad too slow for today. I regularly spend over 1GB a day as I play YouTube with the screen off.

> YouTube works admirably well.

This is what really kills me. I spent a lot of time in 2020 on a 4G connection throttled to 384 Kbps. Video calls? Fine (once you gave it a few seconds to notice the poor throughput and readjust its target bitrate). Most of the web? Not fine. Crazy reversal from the dial-up days when pushing even an audio call over the connection was difficult, and real-time video was a pipe dream that sunk more than one overly-enthusiastic would-be media streaming companies.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#232

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

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.

> In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.

AIM had lots of delightful sounds. Can't say the same about Slack or Teams.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#233

Post by GolfPopper »

Xss3 wrote: post #230
andersa wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like finding out a house you bought doesn't actually have internet after the fact makes it worthless in the modern world and should be a valid reason to reverse the purchase.

It should be part of the buyers due diligence. No sale reversal.

Is there a way to truly do due diligence on that front? Some independent authority that will guarantee available connectivity with a bond or something? You certainly cannot trust the ISPs. Even if their salespeople don't lie to you out of greed, poor tooling, or incompetence, unless there's a working connection already, you run the risk of "sure, you're in our footprint, but we can't physically connect you because reasons" at installation time.

The closest I can think of off the top of my head is requiring a working (and testable) fiber connection before signing, and refuse to close if there isn't one. I have no idea how that would impact trying to buy a home today.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#234

Post by GolfPopper »

smelendez wrote: post #69
nerdjon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have now seen multiple articles about this and none of them talked about how much use it was actually getting today, which I have found disappointing. Not sure why none that I have seen have been any better.

It sounds like AOL won’t disclose that information and the only national survey anyone has cited doesn’t distinguish by ISP.

Disclosure would likely sooner or later compare actual users to people paying for the service, and while a discrepancy of orders of magnitude more of the latter probably wasn't illegal (unless some enterprising AG decides to make it a crime) it would be very bad press. No point in risking that when they can just stay mum.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#235

Post by spauldo »

neuralRiot wrote: post #149
pixelpoet wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was a Slackware guy but I heard good things about Debian. So I tied up our 33.6K modem for three days downloading an ISO. My roommates were pissed but I owned the line.

Then I went to install it and the ISO was corrupted. I never got to try Debian until I joined the Air Force and downloaded it at work.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#236

Post by spauldo »

neuralRiot wrote: post #149
pixelpoet wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A buddy of mine was the reason quotas were set on our shell accounts at our ISP. You could dial in as PPP or just as a regular serial connection to get a login on their BSDI server. He downloaded the Win98 beta to the ISP's server and would ZModem it down from there while the rest of us were sleeping.

Between that and the time I discovered "DISPLAY=:0 xdm" worked from our shell account I'm surprised we weren't kicked off the ISP.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#237

Post by spauldo »

madaxe_again wrote: post #194
varispeed wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Winmodems. Bane of the Linux user’s existence at the time.

Yep. And nothing on the packaging to tell you this.

Later on, there were modems that required a CPU with MMX instructions. Dealt with that a lot when I ran my short-lived computer shop.

I made it a policy in '97 to only buy external modems.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#238

Post by spauldo »

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…

Touch-tone service charge was still a thing in the 90s at Southwestern Bell. My grandpa told 'em he didn't want it because all his phones were still rotary, so they removed the charge.

Turned out that they didn't actually have rotary-only service. My aunt got a princess phone for Christmas and I plugged it in for her with the touch-tone switch on. She could dial out just fine.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#239

Post by Xss3 »

GolfPopper wrote: post #233
Xss3 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be part of the buyers due diligence. No sale reversal.

Is there a way to truly do due diligence on that front? Some independent authority that will guarantee available connectivity with a bond or something? You certainly cannot trust the ISPs. Even if their salespeople don't lie to you out of greed, poor tooling, or incompetence, unless there's a working connection already, you run the risk of "sure, you're in our footprint, but we can't physically connect you because re…

A qualified surveyor should be able to tell you if a fibre line is connected to your home.

Here in the UK at least companies are not allowed to lie about which houses can and cant get service, and there is a regulatory body (ofcom) that regulates this and other telecommunications service aspects.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#240

Post by Xss3 »

Xss3 wrote: post #239
GolfPopper wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to truly do due diligence on that front? Some independent authority that will guarantee available connectivity with a bond or something? You certainly cannot trust the ISPs. Even if their salespeople don't lie to you out of greed, poor tooling, or incompetence, unless there's a working connection already, you run the risk of "sure, you're in our footprint, but we can't physically connect you because re…

A qualified surveyor should be able to tell you if a fibre line is connected to your home. Here in the UK at least companies are not allowed to lie about which houses can and cant get service, and there is a regulatory body (ofcom) that regulates this and other telecommunications service aspects.

Just to add (cant edit). They also regulate speed and can receive fines for over promising and under delivering. As a consumer i can raise this with the ombudsman to force action or remediation.
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