Dialup internet?

[Rigo]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/business/aol-dial-up-internet.html

Who would still be using this?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Fun times!
Back in the early days, how early online gaming got me learning the differences in ISPs...latency, differences in modems, latency/ping times, how to tweak compression in COM ports......oh yeah!

 

[xrobwx71]

Shotgunning 56K modems! Of course you needed 2 phone lines to accomplish this and 2 modems. Doom for Win95 was my first online gaming experience.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Shotgunning 56K modems! Of course you needed 2 phone lines to accomplish this and 2 modems. Doom for Win95 was my first online gaming experience.

I did that...had an external USR 56k and an internal Diamond 33.6. Didn't help gaming though, since it would route just a single IP. Only for slight download rate.

 

[Metanis]

During the late 90s gaming explosion we had as many as 6 teenagers at home, plus my wife and I both gamed. When I ordered the 4th POTS line the local provider was obligated to bury a brand new 12 pair line to my rural house. On this brand new wire it was normal to get 52k connections. I went through dozens of modems though due to thunderstorms and surge damage!

Later, I was the first residence in the entire county to have ISDN installed. And that turned into 3Mb DSL and eventually 25Mb (15Mb usable) using bonded lines. Sadly that is where I remain to this day for a wired connection. The nearest fiber is 1/2 a mile away.

Last year I was able to get a PTP Wireless 50Mb connection that has proven to work well from a goofy company named BugTussel Wireless.

I complained loudly enough to the wired provider they at least cut the price of the DSL in half so I kept it active. My wife was adamant she didn't want to lose her landline either.

I programmed both routers to exactly the same settings so that is one goes down I simply swap 1 ethernet cable and I'm switched over to the other. I left the older DSL router's Wi-Fi enabled so it handles all connected devices while the newer system is Ethernet wired to all the PCs in the house.

When the 20+ kids/grandkids come home with their iPhones they still connect to the old WiFi so it has zero impact on my gaming!

 

[xrobwx71]

I did that...had an external USR 56k and an internal Diamond 33.6. Didn't help gaming though, since it would route just a single IP. Only for slight download rate.

Yeah I tried it and remember it didn't help much. I already had 2 lines so you could game and receive phone calls. If you only had one line and someone picked that receiver up...... or you get the "I keep calling you but I've been getting a busy signal for hours".

 

[britechguy]

If you only had one line and someone picked that receiver up...... or you get the "I keep calling you but I've been getting a busy signal for hours".

That's what made DSL so revolutionary when it first appeared. Getting rid of the need for two (or more) separate phone lines was huge, both in terms of convenience and cost.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

And then...in the days before broadband, for businesses that did not want to pay for ISDN or frame relay/fractional T....they would have a modem for each computer.

I soon found "NAT routers"...that...had a modem port on the WAN side. Some of them had 2 or 3 modem ports...serial ports. Products such as 3COM had an "office connect"...and another brand that got popular, "WebRamp".

This allowed us to set up a typical LAN...sharing a "dial up router"......in a similar fashion to your typical little Linksys or Netgear router, at a 192.168.0.0/24 for example, basic webUI interface, configure the DUN settings for the modems instead of the PPPoE or IP info for broadband.

 

[timeshifter]

Let's not forget that the first cable modems plugged straight in to our computers, hello public Internet IP space!

 

[frase]

GET OFF THE PHONE!

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Let's not forget that the first cable modems plugged straight in to our computers, hello public Internet IP space!

Yup, and DSL too. I remember seeing that people who had that, of course their computer was hanging on the network of the neighborhood. I remember being able to drill into network neighborhood and finding other computers. Some of which you could browse in (since in the early days there was Windows 95/98, so no firewall).

 

[xrobwx71]

That's what made DSL so revolutionary when it first appeared. Getting rid of the need for two (or more) separate phone lines was huge, both in terms of convenience and cost.

Somehow, I skipped DSL entirely, it may have been availability, I don't remember. I do remember looking into ISDN or T1 but they were waaay too expensive. Then Comcast (remember @ Home?) provided cable internet to my neighborhood, I was in pure bliss. Watching those download dialogues go from kb to mb, I was in awe.