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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'
by dlivingston 1y ago
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).
- ack_complete 1y agoApparently 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.
- nosioptar 1y agoI know people just a couple hours from Seattle that still use dial up. Most are older and don't want to spend the obscene prices for satellite, cellular signal isn't good enough out there.
- dzhiurgis 1y agoIs dial up still at 56kbps?
- nosioptar 1y agoAs far as I know. (I haven't personally had dial up in about 20 tears.)
- esseph 1y agoStill over the phone lines, so yep. Extremely lucky if you get that on old copper though.
- chrisco255 1y agoYes. It's a hard limit for old phone lines because they're limited to something like 3.1 khz.
- tptacek 1y agoThe 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.
- Telaneo 1y agoAnd 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.
- dylan604 1y agoIn 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.
- chrisco255 1y agoI don't know how anyone can use the modern internet with dial up. It's got to be useless for all but email.
- nosioptar 1y agoI think that's basically what they use it for. Sites that work well with lynx are OK on dial up.
- grishka 1y agoI'm sure HN is perfectly usable over dial-up as well.
- chrisco255 1y agoFor comments, yeah but to read any of the links would probably take a while.
- _moof 1y agoYou guys are reading the links?
- thecosas 1y agoI 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. A couple examples: https://lite.cnn.com/ https://lite.cnn.com/ https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/
- mortenjorck 1y agoI 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 literally cannot imagine 56K on the modern web.
- nemomarx 1y agoThe 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.
- toast0 1y agoAround me, near Seattle, some of the DSLAMs are port limited. If you want DSL, you've got to wait for a port to open up.
- nosioptar 1y agoDSL isn't available at all to them. The phone infrastructure in their neighborhood is ancient, there's zero cable. Comcast and/or Century Link would be willing to set the neighborhood up, for a pretty sizable fee.
- TimTheTinker 1y agoHere is an excellent use case for SPA web apps. See - a lot of low bandwidth connections still exist in the US. (Sorry to slightly hijack the thread. It's been an ongoing debate on HN)
- jtbaker 1y agoHow does this make sense? SPAs have notoriously large bundles shipped to the client. Maybe in a PWA where the service worker gets saved for offline use. Traditional server-rendered HTML should be orders of magnitude faster than most SPA bundles though.
- TimTheTinker 1y agoFor content-driven sites - absolutely. I'm talking about long-lived apps where work is being accomplished. An SPA allows downloading and caching al or most of the frontend, then further communication can proceed using minimal bandwidth as the user works. With traditional SSR, every page/form the user navigates to requires downloading all markup, styles, and client-side behaviors for that route.
- Espressosaurus 1y agoWeb pages and emails have gotten so bloated, how do you even use the internet over dialup as a consumer?
- bobmcnamara 1y agoI 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.