4 ms·

Dial-Up Is Still, Just Barely, a Thing

42 points by jnord 3y ago

spauldo 3y ago
Dial-up is still used for a lot of industrial uses as well. Have a few tanks of Diesel off away from any network infrastructure? Run a phone line to your ground reader and dial into it from your SCADA software. Many ground readers have modems built in. Works great on military bases where they still use POTS.
JohnFen 3y ago
My friends and I run a private WAN that we use to network between us instead of the public internet. We've been talking about adding a couple of dial-up lines as a backup to ensure access if one or more of us can't reach the gateways in a different way.
- drewnick 3y ago
  If you guys are relatively close together in a similar geography, you may want to look into the amateur radio mesh network called AREDN.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Thanks! We looked at that (and other similar things) a while back and it didn't seem suitable for us at the time, but our network and needs are growing. Probably worth taking another look.
jiveturkey 3y ago
pos terminals maybe?
ralphc 3y ago
I looked up 56K modem on amazon, here's some current use cases from reviews. The medical industry still relies on fax for some documents. This applies to some computer software as well and using email isn't allowed. So, to go along with these archaic standards I needed a modem. This model works with Windows 10 and Server 2019, and will most likely be supported for the next versions. We now recommend this modem to our customers to connect to our industrial product (often installed in areas with marginal phone lines). Nothing fancy required - we're just communicating at 9600 baud - but this modem just seems to work better than others for our application (e.g. compared to Zoom/Hayes external serial, Zoom USB, internal PC modem). In all seriousness we use an outdated service to run credit cards for a restaurant. Our old one stopped working so I purchased the exact same one we had. Plug and play. Works great. Was surprised it was still sold on Amazon!
themadturk 3y ago
My mom still used dialup as late as mid-2019. She didn't want to pay for broadband (though she was swimming in money) and was perfectly happy getting and sending email through Gmail's low-resource HTTP interface via AT&T's dialup service. She's since gone into memory care and no longer knows what email is.
tech234a 3y ago
It's not mentioned in the article, but MSN Dialup Internet is also still a thing: https://get.msn.com/ https://get.msn.com/

42 points by jnord 3y ago

Dial-up is still used for a lot of industrial uses as well. Have a few tanks of Diesel off away from any network infrastructure? Run a phone line to your ground reader and dial into it from your SCADA software. Many ground readers have modems built in. Works great on military bases where they still use POTS.

JohnFen 3y ago

My friends and I run a private WAN that we use to network between us instead of the public internet. We've been talking about adding a couple of dial-up lines as a backup to ensure access if one or more of us can't reach the gateways in a different way.

drewnick 3y ago
If you guys are relatively close together in a similar geography, you may want to look into the amateur radio mesh network called AREDN.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Thanks! We looked at that (and other similar things) a while back and it didn't seem suitable for us at the time, but our network and needs are growing. Probably worth taking another look.

jiveturkey 3y ago

pos terminals maybe?

ralphc 3y ago

I looked up 56K modem on amazon, here's some current use cases from reviews. The medical industry still relies on fax for some documents. This applies to some computer software as well and using email isn't allowed. So, to go along with these archaic standards I needed a modem. This model works with Windows 10 and Server 2019, and will most likely be supported for the next versions. We now recommend this modem to our customers to connect to our industrial product (often installed in areas with marginal phone lines). Nothing fancy required - we're just communicating at 9600 baud - but this modem just seems to work better than others for our application (e.g. compared to Zoom/Hayes external serial, Zoom USB, internal PC modem). In all seriousness we use an outdated service to run credit cards for a restaurant. Our old one stopped working so I purchased the exact same one we had. Plug and play. Works great. Was surprised it was still sold on Amazon!

themadturk 3y ago

My mom still used dialup as late as mid-2019. She didn't want to pay for broadband (though she was swimming in money) and was perfectly happy getting and sending email through Gmail's low-resource HTTP interface via AT&T's dialup service. She's since gone into memory care and no longer knows what email is.

tech234a 3y ago

It's not mentioned in the article, but MSN Dialup Internet is also still a thing: https://get.msn.com/ https://get.msn.com/