Comment by dlivingston
4 days 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).
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.
I 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.
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.
DSL 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.
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Around 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.
Web pages and emails have gotten so bloated, how do you even use the internet over dialup as a consumer?
I don't know how anyone can use the modern internet with dial up. It's got to be useless for all but email.
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 literally cannot imagine 56K on the modern web.
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I'm sure HN is perfectly usable over dial-up as well.
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I think that's basically what they use it for.
Sites that work well with lynx are OK on dial up.
Only if the email client is set to not download images.
Is dial up still at 56kbps?
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.
Yes. It's a hard limit for old phone lines because they're limited to something like 3.1 khz.
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Still over the phone lines, so yep. Extremely lucky if you get that on old copper though.
As far as I know.
(I haven't personally had dial up in about 20 tears.)