Comment by nosioptar
5 days ago
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.
5 days ago
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.
Here 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)
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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.
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'm sure HN is perfectly usable over dial-up as well.
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.
A couple examples:
https://lite.cnn.com/
https://text.npr.org/
For comments, yeah but to read any of the links would probably take a while.
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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.
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.
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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.)