I'm surprised it's still being offered period! My parents live in a remote area outside of a rural town in one of the USA's smaller states, and even they haven't had dial-up in ~15 years. We grew up with dial-up until about 2010, when they switched over to (absolutely terrible) satellite internet. HughsNet, I think it was called. Two-ish years ago they switched over to Starlink and it's been working well (when it does work, anyway).
Apparently they just shut it down in 2024, but a couple of years ago I tested an Atari 1030 modem by dialing out to Earthlink, and it still worked -- successfully connected at 300 baud.
I worked somewhere with a small office run over Hughesnet. Some sort of upload-over-dial-up, broadband-download-over-satellite, with 1500ms latency for everything.
The telecom hasn't tried to get them on DSL? There's subsidized low income programs for it (or where, idk what the status is now) so I can't imagine the cost was much higher. And if I were an ISP I might eat the cost of the upgrade just to avoid support complications for a small set of customers.
DSL is expensive to install and has a limit on distance from a central office. Any new construction today would be fiber instead of copper anyways. I've seen fiber being strung in remote mountain valley where DSL/cable were unavailable. The area was just too far for DSL and the equipment in the CO wasn't up to snuff for it, and cable just never felt enough customers were there to justify running the cable. Everyone in the valley had the old school large satellite dishes. MaBell finally decided to run fiber instead, and there was much rejoicing.
I recently got throttled to ~1Mb/s for going over my mobile data allotment (which incidentally got me to finally switch to an MVNO), and I was amazed at how insufficient a speed that was once considered “broadband” was in 2025. It was basically unusable; sites took 20-30 seconds to load and scrolling a timeline was an exercise in futility.
I used sub mb internet on a cruise and the ping wasn’t even that bad but trying to load anything other than HN was a real pain. 56k was pretty bad even back then, don’t even know how it would be remotely usable today.
I know a few news sites have low bandwidth versions, which are arguable way better than the auto-play video and ads plastered across their “normal” sites.
In some neighborhoods, the equipment wasn't able to support 56kbps so 33.6 was the best available. That's how my parent's house was. Too far away to get DSL. Lines were too noisy for 56.6. My parents tried HughesNet at one point, but it was shite. Starlink would have been a good option, but they eventually strung fiber to the area before Starlink was still an idea on paper.
The channels themselves are limited to 64k (like, that's what they are digitally) and then the signaling over analog channels steals a bit, bringing you to 56k.
And that assumes you have damn near a perfect phone line. Any interference along the line is probably going to knock you down to 33.6. I wonder if they keep stats on that.
Intense nostalgia. It brings me back to a point in time where the world suddenly turned and the possibilities seemed limitless. And all of those possibilities looked a little more idealistic, and a little less mercenary than what we actually got.
Not that I'm really complaining. I do like what we got.
And curiously different from the AI revolution, where there are no pretensions of idealism at at all, and everyone clearly understands that whoever wins this time will quite literally own the entire world, if the plan succeeds. And that it won't be a pleasant or pretty world for the rest of us, and that all of the leading candidates for King of the Universe don't care at all that the rest of us will be discarded. The complete opposite, in that regard.
I shall have to break out my set of AOL CD drink coasters, and put songs from Camelot on permanent repeat in order to mark the passing of an age with the solemnity it deserves.
I wish we had gotten municipal fiber. Back when telecoms had to lease their lines the competition was great. Cable companies growing fat on outdated cable lines has held many of us back for too long.
My parents didn't have AOL when I was a kid; we had Prodigy, I think because they had promotions to get a cheap or free computer if you signed up for N years of Prodigy internet.
I was always kind of jealous of my friends who had AOL because I wanted the "You've Got Mail!" greeting, and I would see promotions that talk about "AOL Keywords" and I couldn't use those with Prodigy.
Amazing to think that AOL still offered dial-up service.
I thought they were just a web portal and email service. It is amazing they still offered ISP services this long.
They had some pretty unscrupulous business practices back in the day with their free trial CD mailers. My cousin worked in their call center ages ago and would sometimes convince even people who didn't have a computer to pay for the service.
One wonders what the dial up ops department/team at AOL even looks like now. I wonder if it's anyone's full time job, or just something that occupies a fraction of their time.
Something low-resource demand (like my blog) would probably be okay, save for a few large pics on some pages. Most people who run in the smolweb circles also like vintage computing, so creating webspaces using only HTML & CSS is common practice, which should do fine over a 56k connection.
No need to wonder, just end up in an old building with thick brick walls that are only penetrated by a weak 2G signal and try to load something on your phone.
Not possible anymore is many areas, where 2G and 3G networks have been shutdown to re-use spectrum for newer standards. The last time I was in a rural area with minimal signal strength, my phone was alternating between satellite-only messaging or 5G with 5-10 MB/s. I was actually able to download a movie in a quite reasonable amount of time, presumably because there wasn't anyone else doing much with the cell tower I was barely in range of.
Out in rural Michigan, there are plenty of spots where an LTE signal technically exists but you can't do much beyond calls and texts (and even those fail sometimes), and it's interesting to see what apps still work. For instance, YouTube will still load and play videos, albeit at an abysmal pace that's really not worth it (and it's interesting to see how the app prioritizes the video itself over its metadata, to the point that you could watch an entire video in 144p before the channel name and description load), while my bank's app just fails entirely despite ostensibly requiring less bandwidth than video playback.
You can test it yourself in the comfort of your gigabit connection. I wanted to test my barrage of very small images using lazy loading on a crappy connection. I learned that Chrome can easily pretend to suck. On Safari you somehow need to download a special tool but it works just as well.
3 million CD frisbee salute for our old friend (which pissed off our parents because we held up the phone like loading dynamic drive so they couldn’t call their sister)
> AOL's former chief marketing officer Jan Brandt estimates that the company spent more than $300 million handing out all those free trials. The marketing effort allegedly cornered half of the world's CD market.
Over in the UK, our phone lines are about to become 100% digital. Anyone with the old analogue modems now has some rather nice paperweights. I've still got an USR Robotics modem that was originally 14.4k, got upgraded a few times from 33k6 to v92 and an Hayes v92 modem gathering dust in storage.
>This change will not affect any other benefits in your AOL plan, which you can access any time on your AOL plan dashboard. To manage or cancel your account, visit MyAccount
Sounds like everyone keeps getting charged, since this is technically part of their "AOL plan", whatever that actually includes.
Benefits such as virus protection for email that you don't use, and a free AOL Toolbar with shopping offers you don't have installed. Thank you for your $10 a month you forgot we were charging you for 15 years.
When I worked at AOL in 2010, dialup was their biggest source of revenue still. It'd be interesting to see the drop-off since then. I imagine it's trending down pretty quick as the generation using it kicks the bucket.
By 2015 it was no longer even a top level item reported in revenue, in 2014 it was like 5% of revenue. They pivoted hard to ads and media (HuffPost, TechCrunch, etc)
There are older generations with aol.com email addresses including my MIL who despite being given multiple gmail addresses over the years still refuses to change and stop paying for it
Most are older and don't want to spend the obscene prices for satellite, cellular signal isn't good enough out there.
Comcast and/or Century Link would be willing to set the neighborhood up, for a pretty sizable fee.
(Sorry to slightly hijack the thread. It's been an ongoing debate on HN)
I literally cannot imagine 56K on the modern web.
A couple examples:
https://lite.cnn.com/
https://text.npr.org/
Sites that work well with lynx are OK on dial up.
(I haven't personally had dial up in about 20 tears.)
Not that I'm really complaining. I do like what we got.
And curiously different from the AI revolution, where there are no pretensions of idealism at at all, and everyone clearly understands that whoever wins this time will quite literally own the entire world, if the plan succeeds. And that it won't be a pleasant or pretty world for the rest of us, and that all of the leading candidates for King of the Universe don't care at all that the rest of us will be discarded. The complete opposite, in that regard.
I shall have to break out my set of AOL CD drink coasters, and put songs from Camelot on permanent repeat in order to mark the passing of an age with the solemnity it deserves.
I was always kind of jealous of my friends who had AOL because I wanted the "You've Got Mail!" greeting, and I would see promotions that talk about "AOL Keywords" and I couldn't use those with Prodigy.
Amazing to think that AOL still offered dial-up service.
And this version combining the graphic and the sound used to make the graphic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo
And this alternative version (h/t @Kye): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpMrTxMV6E4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF2v32xCD0Y
https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/c...
The dial-up sound just evokes that early Internet feel so perfectly...
They had some pretty unscrupulous business practices back in the day with their free trial CD mailers. My cousin worked in their call center ages ago and would sometimes convince even people who didn't have a computer to pay for the service.
A Google SERP with rich content: about 20 minutes
A typical Facebook post: ten minutes
CNN home page: half an hour
YouTube: forget it
This should be much faster, it was created for people with limited network access.
https://lite.cnn.com/
Or as worse I guess.
But im pretty sure the answer is really damn slow.
I always create an alias to make that sound and another for the matrix phone sound when I connect to the internet.
the sound files are available here: https://www.soundjay.com/dial-up-modem-sound-effect.html
for the matrix:
alias wifion="nmcli dev wifi connect 'wifi-name'" && paplay /path/to/soundfile/matrix-phone.wav
for the old dial up tones:
alias wifioff="nmcli d disconnect wlp3s0" && /path/to/soundfile/dial-up-modem-02.wav
linux has loads of these sounds in /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo
Shutting down services is what happens when a brand is bought up by private equity. Them and Yahoo are owned by Apollo.
And a video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpMrTxMV6E4
> AOL's former chief marketing officer Jan Brandt estimates that the company spent more than $300 million handing out all those free trials. The marketing effort allegedly cornered half of the world's CD market.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/aol-cd-rom-collect...
I wonder if AOL will stop charging people on dial-up only, or if they will later claim "oops, sorry..."
Sounds like everyone keeps getting charged, since this is technically part of their "AOL plan", whatever that actually includes.
weeeeeeeeeee
kzzzzzzzzzzz
Thought 2... DIALUP IS STILL AROUND?!?!