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Build your own dial-up ISP in 2019
- bitkarma 8y agoI quickly went from "what a fun weekend project" to "where on Earth would I find two landlines to test with?"
- simook 8y agojust need a Landline-as-a-service :)
- icedchai 8y agoIt already exists and is called a VOIP provider! You won't get very high bandwidth but you can generally get 9600 baud or so.
- jf 8y agoThis came up every few months when I was at Twilio (2012-2014) - primarily regarding supporting faxes. From what I remember from the folks who knew SIP really well, the issue was mainly that there's too much variability in terms of latency and the modulation/demodulation of the analog signals that modems use.
- lozaning 8y ago100% of the companies that I installed LG IPECS systems into back in the day also became e-fax customers. By the time you've got a dedicated channel for the fax machine (missing an inbound PO delivered via fax because the sales team is hitting the phones hard doesn't fly anywhere) and are paying an additional monthly fee for another DID the cost is usually a wash anyways. It's money exceptionally well spent to not have to worry about G.729 jitter and the nightmare that is analog>digital>analog>digital and back.
- mbreese 8y agoThe article didn’t even use them. They hacked a single voip ata with two ports and connected those together. That’s a pretty elegant (albeit impractical) solution to that rather unique problem.
- dag11 8y agoInternet over phone over internet :D
- reaperducer 8y agoI quickly went from "what a fun weekend project" to "where on Earth would I find two landlines to test with?" Ask one of the 151,287,292 people in the United States who have a landline.
- jolmg 8y agoAren't most ISPs worldwide phone service providers? I get a landline forcibly packaged with my internet service. I don't even have a landline phone.
- jethro_tell 8y agoThey are usually VoIP phone providers, they are just running a phone connection over the data you already paid for. Modems and fax machines are pretty sensitive, and pushing that sound over a packet switched network with UDP instead of a circuit switched network leaves a lot to be desired. So there are some places that still support old copper lines, but in many places, if they have to run a new line, they'll run a coax or fiber to your house and give you a plug in off of that. It's basically not an offering in many places now.
- tracker1 8y agoIt may be different now, but I remember back in the early 00's being unable to get better than a 14.4 connection over voip... That's all the provider would guarantee and was intended for fax use.
- sebst 8y agoI've built something like that from a bunch of used hardware in my teens. DSL connections were just available (in Germany) and came with a data flat rate. I was in the lucky position that I could convince my parents to get such a contract. A friend of mine, who could not get a DSL connections because back then he lived in an uncovered area, could at least get a telephone "flat rate" for free telephone calls on Sundays. So, he dialed in my Pentium 133 server and used my DSL connection behind a NAT every Sunday.
- znpy 8y agoThis is friendship.
- stygiansonic 8y agoThis brought back some good memories. My dad had to work in a remote area for a while and rented an apartment. No DSL/broadband either. We had DSL/broadband back at "home" and I setup a dialup server (running on Windows 2000) built out of spare parts. I forget the details but remember it worked fine, up to around 33.6 kbps. Of course, it tied up two phone lines when in use.
- xutopia 8y agoWouldn't it be cool if you could use your cellphone instead of using a data plan?
- blackaspen 8y agoDial-up over a cell call? It's called CSD (Circuit switched data), and it tops out at ~9.6Kbps if I remember correctly.
- johann8384 8y agoAnd isn't available on many networks these days.
- LeoPanthera 8y agoThere was briefly a thing called HSCSD ("high-speed circuit switched data"), which allowed for 14.4k per circuit, and you could make two simultaneous connections to get 28.8k. It was basically ISDN over GSM. But you paid per minute (twice as much for 28k) and it was swiftly killed off by GPRS.
- snuxoll 8y agoUsed this way back in the day when we got rid of our landline phone (this was around 2000), used my Kyocera phone as a modem to dial into our Earthlink service. Since we had unlimited night and weekend calling we primarily used the internet around then, oh boy was downloading Windows NT SP6 back then fun.
- joecool1029 8y ago>There was briefly a thing called HSCSD That was never deployed commercially in the US, it tied up too many channels. I was able to use CSD on T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless back in the day. Worked well enough during unlimited nights and weekends to get on IRC.
- convivialdingo 8y agoA few years ago I needed a way to SSH onto a dial-up server during a trip. Since hotspot was still an add-on, I bought a cheapie $15 Verizon prepaid flip phone and used that with a USB cable. It appeared as a serial modem under Linux. The amusing thing was that apparently Verizon didn’t setup any sort of billing for my use-case, and since I never used the voice or text the thing just continued to work for a couple of years. It worked after the service cancelled, after the number was reclaimed, and then finally stopped only once the SIM card would no longer register on the network. Not that I really cared - it was 9600 baud and I only used it a handful of times. Still a funny hack.
- cure 8y agoI operated something like this around 2005 in a big hotel building (~400 bedrooms and various offices) with a dinky internet connection and no wifi yet (very thick walls, up in the mountains, limited budgets...). So I built a dial-up pool on an internal number (this place had its own PBX with ~500 phone lines) hooked to a Debian box, served by a bunch of USR Courier modems. Good times :)
- xd 8y agoPlease, one day, do a write up on this!
- 52-6F-62 8y agoI second!
- elliottcarlson 8y agoReally off-topic, but this is why I actually miss seeing the upvote score on comments -- without knowing the score, we don't know how popular this opinion is (personally I would love to see a write up on this as well); and since there's no way to see the popularity, we get this chain of people seconding/thirding the statement.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- giancarlostoro 8y agoBack when we used dial-up I couldn't outright switch to Linux because I couldn't get on AOL from Linux (or I didn't know how) I tried everything too. Then once we had a normal router it was wireless drivers that was my issue, nowadays it's mostly my GPU drivers. I have used Linux more exclusively now, but if I can't get online out of the box that's the biggest deal breaker for a distro for me.
- abeyer 8y agoI remember those days...I lived in a small town that didn't have a local ISP for a long time, so stayed on AOL for dialup because of their local dialup number. I'd used the AOL client from another machine and then set up NAT behind AOL's TCP tunneling to get access from Linux and Solaris machines.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoYeah I must've been 14 and had no idea how Linux worked, so I never figured it out LOL at least I got to try Knoppix over the years.
- MBCook 8y agoI remember the fun of trying to get PPP working in Linux the first time. Dial in. Search for instructions. Print them out. Reboot into Linux. Try it. Doesn’t work. Write down error. Reboot into Windows. Dial up again. Search for error. Repeat until you hate yourself. Wait, you need a new package. Go back to Windows and download it. Stick it somewhere Linux can see it. Reboot into Linux. Install the package. Find out it has missing dependencies. Go back to step one. Got all the dependencies. Start at the top again. I don’t remember if I ever got PPP working before I had Ethernet based net access and no longer needed dial up.
- morpheuskafka 8y agoI'm working on a project that will be using PPP or SLIP to sync CouchDB over a serial-based RF link. It's really weird to see code in the slip.c file that's older than I am: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blame/master/drivers/net/slip/slip.c https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blame/master/drivers/net/s....
- howard941 8y ago> Note: You will have a lot of trouble using a softmodem/winmodem! You are much better off using a hardware-based modem. Some things never change
- wmf 8y agoSince they rely on drivers, I wonder if winmodems even work under Windows. Good luck running a Windows 98 driver under Windows 10.
- toast0 8y agoA circa 1998 winmodem may not have current drivers, but my circa 2008 Sell laptops have winmodems and they work in Windows 10. You can still buy winmodems today, they're just USB.
- nategri 8y agoYep, I definitely remember the 'winmodem' as the primary villain in my early attempts to get my first linux box online ca. 1999
- setquk 8y agoBeen there. Had to reboot into windows to download half the missing deb packages, then find out there were more missing ones!
- tracker1 8y agoFavorite quote screamed in anger by a friend after "Plug n Play" first came out... It was a few hours into trouble-shooting an early PnP ISA card for several hours trying to get it to work. "Plug in play! Fuck plug n play! My ass is plug n play!"
- hexmiles 8y agoThis article came at just the right time. Maybe the HN crow can help me with this one. I have a lot of old hardware that i want to connect to the to my network. Most of them have a 56k modem the rest a 14/28k modem. What can i use to bring them all online at the same time. I tough to use some voip adapter (from pots to ethernet) but from what i understand there are not good for modem/fax style signal, also i need something that can handle at least 8 client at the same time (the number of computer to connect is 22 at the time but i don't know how realistic is to connect all of them at the same time using this method). When i searched (i couple of month ago, so i might get wrong some terminology) i only found some enterprise pbx that were awfully expensive (1000$) i hope for something more cheap. I didn't find anything that work. EDIT: Also i'm not sure how to understand if the hardware that i plan to use can do what i need. What do i need to look in a pots to voip converter to work as modem "server". If i sound confused is because i am. I have a plan B, that consist of using serial port and emulate old style Hayes modem by a central more powerful (and modern) computer using a lot of usb2serial adapter, but i would rather avoid that since some computer have only 1 serial port and is already used for other hardware forcing me to choose between connectivity and the other device. Also some of the hardware it's not compatible with serial modem. I've already test this approach and (expect the aforementioned shortcoming) it works quite well. Thank you all in advance
- icedchai 8y agoYou need a terminal server: it has multiple serial ports on one side, ethernet on the other. You will need serial cables going from client devices to the terminal server. The serial cables should be the "null modem" variety, so no actual modem is needed. Hopefully you have spare serial ports, or can replace the modems on the clients with serial cards. Take a look on ebay for "terminal server", "console server", etc.
- hexmiles 8y agoI planned to use a lot of cheap usb to rs232 converter. I didn't know about console server. They seem very neat! I have only two question: 1- They seem to all use RJ45 i'd imagine that i would use a cable RJ45<->RS232. I found some on amazon, but i don't know if they are standard or i need to look for some specific type of cable. 2- Do they allow the "master" ethernet port to talk to all serial port at the same time? I found some conflitting information about it. If not the usb<->rs232 seem a better solution. Thank you a lot!
- int_19h 8y agoBack when we used dial-up for Internet access, and it was charged by time, we used P2P dial-up connectivity to share downloaded stuff - one person would set up a dial-up server (Windows had that capability even in 9x days; still does, I think), the other one would dial in, and then we'd use IRC and FTP on the resulting intranet, chatting while the data was transferred.
- roel_v 8y agoBut what's it like surfing the web on 56k6 nowadays? It was painful 15 years ago, doesn't seem like it would be feasible today. ('feasible' as in 'would actually use this for something', not as in 'technically works')
- colanderman 8y agoActually, it might not even technically work, due to bugs like this which cause slow connections to be dropped: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-curious-case-of-slow-downloads/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-curious-case-of-slow-downloa...
- Cerium 8y agoChrome DevTools has a feature that will let you try it out. I am right now. On the Network tab there is a throttling option. I added a profile for 56k, and based on some research set it to 6kb/s upload and download as well as 100ms ping. It is painful. Loading this thread's comments page took about 23 seconds, though loading the form I am submitting this comment on only took about 4 seconds. I think it could be workable if you were to set uBlock to block all images and scripts.
- shampster 8y agoI'd do 56kbps download, 48kps upload, at 100ms. Still loads this comments page fairly fast!
- kalleboo 8y agoKilobits or kilobytes? A 56k modem is max 56 kilobits/s, a.ka. 7 kilobytes/s (although realistically I never synced over 50k, and more common something like 48k)
- tracker1 8y agoThe once popular developer site 15seconds was named because that's roughly how long a person would wait for a site to load... I'd say closer to 3-4 now is where I get really cranky.
- kwccoin 8y agoI wonder as many do not actually use the mobile phone as a phone and we have sometimes 1000 min free, can we use mobile phone as a kind of isp. It can connect to internet via calling? Not sure any notebook with sim card can do as not sure they take call.
- Johnny555 8y agoYou might be able to, but you won't be happy with the results -- cell phones use low bandwidth compression codecs, around 12kbs if I remember correctly, but for use as a modem, you'd be lucky to get half that or less. Browsing the modern internet at 6kbs sounds painful.
- gsich 8y agoDepends, GSM codec is indeed low bandwidth, G722.2 is not.
- Johnny555 8y agoEven G722.2 is low bandwidth compared to speeds you'd want: to surf the internet at: When used in mobile phone networks, there are three different configurations (combinations of bitrates) that may be used for voice channels: Configuration A (Config-WB-Code 0): 6.6, 8.85, and 12.65 kbit/s (Mandatory multi-rate configuration) Configuration B (Config-WB-Code 2): 6.6, 8.85, 12.65, and 15.85 kbit/s Configuration C (Config-WB-Code 4): 6.6, 8.85, 12.65, and 23.85 kbit/s*
- gsich 8y agoOh, I'm sorry, I had a different bandwidth in mind, the audio bandwidth.
- gsich 8y agoOn Android it's hard to receive/send voice data from a call to your own application
- 8y ago
- kwccoin 8y agoA related question when Putin ask to cut off Russia from the Internet or China's eGreat Wall, can the BGP with your own ISP can override it.
- tegansnyder 8y agoAh the dial-up ISP days. As an young enterprising middle schooler 20+ years ago I started one with the help of my father. I remember stringing together a bunch of modems to a Postmaster and getting a rollover PRI line from the local telco. If my memory serves me it had 24 lines and would roll over if one was busy. We even made some of our own installation floppy disks and placed them at the local video rental store so people could self install. Fun times!
- janetacarr 8y agoNostalgia aside, can a network without border gateway peering be considered an ISP? It seems like a more apt term might be dial-up network provider.