Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 240 posts

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#91

Post by icedchai »

varispeed wrote: post #87
icedchai wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes! Also, early ISPs were often massively over subscribed. They might have fractional T1 line coming into a POP (example: 384Kbit line) with 100 modems off of it. At peak times, you not only got busy signals, but when you did get through, a slow connection because that upstream pipe was full...

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#92

Post by ufmace »

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.

At least when they were blasting floppy disks with their software everywhere, it was actually useful. Anyone even remotely interested in computer stuff could easily accumulate dozens of them without even trying. Just format 'em and they'd work fine for making copies of all the things that needed 5-10 disks to install.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#93

Post by tombert »

A small part of me has debated artificially limiting my internet speeds to 56k, to see how well I could actually live with dial-up speeds.

If I did everything with w3m and Mutt and whatnot, I could see myself living almost comfortably.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#95

Post by kstrauser »

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.

Same here. I lived in the middle of nowhere but somehow surprisingly close to a remote CO, and I could regularly get 44Kbps connections. My friends were envious.

My "favorite" thing when working tech support was explaining to people in expensive new subdivisions that Southwest Bell saved money by deploying pair gains instead of running more copper, and that's why they were never, ever going to see more than 33.6 (if very lucky) or 28.8 (more likely).

A common trick was to get them to add 3 commas to their dial string. That would prevent their modem from starting to train up until 3 seconds after they finished dialing. That would give our modems time to answer and start the 56K initiation. The delay would cause them to miss that, and then start trying to train up a much more stable 33.6 connection. It capped their max speed but made their connection a lot more reliable.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#96

Post by mcny »

sandworm101 wrote: post #88
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…

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

I can't prove this but I somehow remember peaks of up to 48 kilobits per second though never sustained.

I remember being amazed to see download resume right in the browser even as late as 2009 (I was only on dial up u til about 2006).

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#97

Post by throwzasdf »

tombert wrote: post #93

A small part of me has debated artificially limiting my internet speeds to 56k, to see how well I could actually live with dial-up speeds. If I did everything with w3m and Mutt and whatnot, I could see myself living almost comfortably.

Enable Chrome Developer Tools, you can choose the simulated speed to test.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#98

Post by throwaway984393 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #88
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…

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

IIRC limit isn't the copper, it's the CO interconnects with high/low frequency cutoffs, the same copper was used for 1.5Mbps synchronous DSL. For very short runs, 50Mbps VDSL

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#99

Post by aaronbaugher »

kstrauser wrote: post #95
icedchai wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same here. I lived in the middle of nowhere but somehow surprisingly close to a remote CO, and I could regularly get 44Kbps connections. My friends were envious. My "favorite" thing when working tech support was explaining to people in expensive new subdivisions that Southwest Bell saved money by deploying pair gains instead of running more copper, and that's why they were never, ever going to see more than 33.6 (if…

I lived in the country with pretty poor phone lines, so I'd send my 56k modem a command to limit it to 19.2. If it tried to train up to 28.8, there would be so many bad blocks it'd grind to a stop with all the retransmits until it dropped back to 19.2 anyway, so locking it there worked best.

Re: AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

#100

Post by toast0 »

londons_explore wrote: post #17
scarface_74 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It couldn’t be too many people. Back in 2015, they only had 2.1 million dial up users and that number must have gone down in a decade https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/08/10/aol-dial-up-i... But then again, I would love to have a business that has 2.1 million people or even 100 thousand people paying $10 a month…

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.

There's a few dial up wholesalers out there still. I don't know if the AOL dialer is still proprietary, but I would imagine they could outsource at least most of the pops to keep the revenue flowing, if they really wanted to.

OTOH, maybe shutting down AOL dialup helps Verizon drop its landline business. All the ILECs seem to be in a race to eliminate landlines.

Post reply on HN