Comment by imzadi
1 day ago
Probably people in rural areas that have limited access to other options. Starlink has probably absorbed most of that market, so no need to have dial up anymore.
1 day ago
Probably people in rural areas that have limited access to other options. Starlink has probably absorbed most of that market, so no need to have dial up anymore.
Starlink is so much more expensive though, more than a lot of people in rural areas can afford.
Dialup could be had for very cheap last time I had if (big if) you had availability of cellular internet that is probably just as cheap now. However, the landline I had for dialup back in the day had become outright ridiculous in price by the time I convinced my wife we should cancel it (she liked that it worked when the power was out). It seems they don't even want to sell that service anymore.
VoIP is cheap but you need internet for VoIP and I'm not actually sure you could connect a modem to a VoIP even if it wasn't nonsensical.
AT&T used to be the default landline provider for my address, but they recently got the regulators to release them from that responsibility, so now there isn't one. So I can't buy a landline for my property, even though there's copper running right past it and a pedestal where all they'd have to do is reconnect the line to my house. If I call AT&T, they'll sell me a cell phone, but not a landline.
Fortunately I have fiber (from another company), so it's not a problem; but the concept of being able to get a landline anywhere is going away.
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No, it is not feasible to run modem signals over VOIP, as the various codecs all compress signals and cut frequencies and all manner of things to reduce bandwidth consumption, which are incompatible with modem signaling. You could get away with it in a homelab for fun, but you have absolutely no control over what VOIP codecs e.g. Comcast is running, so it is effectively impossible. Even if the phone company says they can offer you a copper line, your copper line will eventually get converted to VOIP at the end of the street or wherever, and then it's up to whatever commercial provider you're paying to choose the codecs for VOIP, which are never modem-friendly. I worked on this stuff about ten years ago. There are fax codecs but they are very hard to get working reliably.
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You would be surprised how much people in extremely rural areas are being gouged for really crappy internet.
I have a place less than an hour from Denver and without Starlink there are many, many people on extremely bad, oversubscribed 1Mbit DSL at the end of some gnarly POPs.
There are sometimes local ISPs that provide p2p wifi in extremely limited areas (see: rich neighborhoods) and its fine but for 20/10 you're paying similar prices or more than Starlink for something that's less reliable.
But 56k dialup (actual speed more like 25k) is too slow to load an https certificate before most sites time out. You aren't going to be able to load google.com
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Cellular internet. Edit: I'm not saying it's a good replacement for dialup, just that I have observed that many cell phone carriers are advertising plans for it now.
Rural mountainous areas have very bad cell coverage. When I grew up the local Verizon store didn't actually get signal and you had to drive up the road from there to take calls.
Those are the kinda places I imagine are expensive to run new installs to, so it's really phone lines or satellite
Here is "ping 8.8.8.8" showing latency over cellular internet some of the time, and I live in the centre of a city:
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Many rural areas have no cellular service. I vacation in an area where Satellite, landline phone service, and some very bad DSL service are the only options. Since it's a vacation spot, we opt not to use the internet there, but there are people who live there.
Where I live in Colorado there is literally no cell coverage by any cellular provider. No 5/4/or 3G coverage in miles in any direction while outside and no matter how far up the mountain behind my house I climb.
Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and they don't really care that its not true.
In very rural places, they may only have edge or 3g at best, if they have any connection.
No idea why you're being downvoted. I can right now today call AT&T and get 300Mb cellular internet for my house. It's $65/mo.