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AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

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Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#81

Post by londons_explore »

protocolture wrote: post #29
londons_explore wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem to make sense for AOL to shut it down... I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems. Even with 100k customers, I doubt there are more than 0.1% of them connected at a time - the rest will just be paying the bill for a service they don't use.

>I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems. Pretty much. But you might find reliably hardware hard to come by. It would be an ebay operation for sure, sort of like running an internet history museum.

software modems have been a thing for ages. No physical wires - it'll be voip direct to soft modems on a couple of big linux servers.

You can probably do it all on AWS with no physical infra.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#82

Post by aaronbaugher »

jonbiggums22 wrote: post #80
robertoandred wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink is so much more expensive though, more than a lot of people in rural areas can afford.

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…

AT&T used to be the default landline provider for my address, but they recently got the regulators to release them from that responsibility, so now there isn't one. So I can't buy a landline for my property, even though there's copper running right past it and a pedestal where all they'd have to do is reconnect the line to my house. If I call AT&T, they'll sell me a cell phone, but not a landline.

Fortunately I have fiber (from another company), so it's not a problem; but the concept of being able to get a landline anywhere is going away.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#83

Post by varispeed »

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.)

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.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#84

Post by Minor49er »

dfedbeef wrote: post #65
unethical_ban wrote: post #27

I got 600 hours free with a copy of Chex Quest (DooM reskin for kids) in a box of cereal.

I FORGOT ABOUT CHEX QUEST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest

But do you remember the Mr. Pibb first-person shooter?

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-the-3d-interactiv...

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#85

Post by unquietwiki »

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.

I've got in-laws that use 12yo Macs; would not surprise me in the least if a lot of older folks were still using whatever box from Best Buy or a relative they got in the late 00s.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#86

Post by icedchai »

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.

You may have connected at 56K, but it was rare to see in practice. I worked for an ISP and we could see all the stats. We had Ascend Max equipment. To add further confusion, your modem may have been reporting the serial port rate, not the actual line rate.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#87

Post by varispeed »

icedchai wrote: post #86
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.

You may have connected at 56K, but it was rare to see in practice. I worked for an ISP and we could see all the stats. We had Ascend Max equipment. To add further confusion, your modem may have been reporting the serial port rate, not the actual line rate.

Makes sense. Just like today my phone shows 5G and full bars, but is as slow as dial up.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#88

Post by sandworm101 »

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…

Iirc, most copper lines had a 50kb cap, making 56kb modems liars.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#89

Post by jonbiggums22 »

aaronbaugher wrote: post #82
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…

AT&T used to be the default landline provider for my address, but they recently got the regulators to release them from that responsibility, so now there isn't one. So I can't buy a landline for my property, even though there's copper running right past it and a pedestal where all they'd have to do is reconnect the line to my house. If I call AT&T, they'll sell me a cell phone, but not a landline. Fortunately I have…

Yeah, I think the POTS line is gone for good since I canceled it. The company doesn't even show it as an offering on their website any longer, only selling VoIP with DSL at this point. The cranked up price was probably a nudge to get rid of any holdouts.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#90

Post by jlarocco »

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.

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