I speed limited my kids internet to 56kbps to make them go do chores. At first they complained that it broke everything. Later they were finding the most text based sites and waiting for them to load. They learnt and adapted.
accidentally turning your kids into Web 1.0 enjoyers lol
Time to fire up Protoweb!
They discovered patience that I never knew they had in them.
Goodbye
TIL that AOL is still a thing.
Lol beat me to it!
Is anyone still using dial-up?
In the U.S., according to Census Bureau data, an estimated 163,401 households were using dial-up alone to get online in 2023, representing just over 0.13% of all homes with internet subscriptions nationwide.
(AP News)
As far as US households, looks like not many. Most likely very remote locations. I had also read that some businesses maintain a dial up connection as a backup for broadband outages
It's funny that the US still has dial-up. In the Netherlands the last dial-up provider stopped their service on oktober 1st 2021, and that was already late.
If Netherlands was a US state it would be ranked 42/50 in area. We have zero-population zones larger than your whole country. Our government refused to spend taxpayer money properly on telecom infrastructure since the 1990s so some of us are stuck here with Pony Express internet, it’s awful.
Oh and now our corrupt gov wants to eliminate “wasteful” fiber in exchange for Musk becoming a trillionaire with Starlink. Lovely.
You’re comparing very different sizes geographically. This chart seems to indicate that around 2015 there were about 1.6 billion miles or 2.5 billion kilometers of telephone wire deployed across the US. Running fiber or coax across the same distances is costly. Electricity and telephone service reached just about every house in the 1930s because the government paid for it as part of Depression-era spending, then declared that these items were necessary utilities that must be provided to new homes and businesses constructed later. A lot of the telecom companies were hoping to get the government to do that again. There have been some bills providing government money for these, but the telecom companies have been trying to take the money but do the bare minimum or only roll out wireless service, and the government has been slow providing funding. Meanwhile SpaceX has been trying to say they should get the money instead because they can get everyone online faster and their low orbit constellation doesn’t have the latency issues of the satellite internet traditionally available to rural customers. I think they cancelled the money that had been awarded and gave it to SpaceX back when Musk was running the government this spring. And of course, none of the companies want the Internet classified as a utility because then they have to provide equal access to everything instead of trying to slow access to Netflix unless Netflix pays them.
I think the biggest surprise for me is that there's still anywhere in the country with genuine actual POTS lines. I thought the Plain Old Telephone Service was dead and that those places that still had phone numbers were six feet of phone line to a VoIP converter box to an internet connection.
Just before my mother retired as a school secretary, she was telling me all the hell they had to go through to keep a fax machine running in the age of IP telephony.
Wire is pretty much never removed once it's laid out and I'm sure a lot of DSL based internet connections still run over same twisted pair that would have carried POTS lines.
But you're probably right that there's a VoIP device keeping these up and working, maybe just more than 6 ft away and instead in some Telco box down the street.
I think POTS installations will remain for decades more in niche cases - emergency backups in elevators, security systems, hospitals, fire departments. And evidently Grandma's AOL internet connection up until this month haha
RIP, I still remember getting those AOL CDs in the mail, and was so excited by the concept of a disk that could allow me to connect to the world wide web.
I remember the 3.5" floppy disks saying "200 free hours!"
I remember drilling out the the write protect hole so I could reuse them. Floppies were expensive and I was broke as a teenager, I loved aol disks.
My uncle would take me to computer shows and your could grab a 50 pack of those floppies shrink wrapped. I might even have a few still floating around in my computer junk drawer.
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