People Still Use Dial-Up Internet!

Believe it or not, 56K dial-up connections still exist!

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[nathanthehappy]

My friends recently got access to starlink up here in canada, the instant they swapped, unnamed internet companies suddenly announced it was "profitable" to run higher speed internet to them... totally bro, once you start losing customers you gotta act huh

I still get notifications daily about this comment a year later...
anyway, starlink isnt sustainable imo, but competition is a good thing that helps make a market fair for consumers however, letting the market provide essential/near essential services (hydro, electricity, internet, roads, schools etc) is a very bad idea.
Canadas rules make it very hard for foreign companies to set up shop, especially in the internet provider space, so duopolies have formed over the services our government doesnt provide,
Internet.

[Xtrems]

We definitely need to fix this. As internet speeds get higher for most, internet site designers get sloppier and sloppier. Less and less people care about sites being lightweight so that they load up fast even on slow connections. They are more and more bloated, and that means that a dial-up connection is way worse today than it was 2, 3, or 6 years ago.

[spicytuna]

My great-grandmother used dial-up until 2019. She's 98 years old now and still kicking. Meanwhile, I have a friend from my hometown who couldn't stand that the local phone company was going to make him pay $160 a month because in order to have internet, they require you to sign up for a landline, and the speed he'd get was some 5 Mbps. He signed up with HughesNet satellite and hated it too because he'd get 10 Mbps and had a 40 GB cap. That was about 10 years ago, and I think they stopped requiring landlines since my brother doesn't have a landline and now gets 30 Mbps through the local guys.

I had 10 Mbps in 2011 and I felt like a god. Now, my wife and I get 180 Mbps. I didn't realize how stupid fast that is compared to what I used to have until I downloaded The Last of Us on my PS3 in like a half hour. Back when I was single, downloading games was something you started right before bed and checked on in the morning.

[darkcodemonkey]

I love when a video like this gets posted, because the amount of people that dont realize that this is a major issue in the US (and to be fair, other parts of the world) is amazing. They have never lived in an area without decent internet coverage, so they assume that it is the case everywhere when it simply isnt. My parents used dial up for a few years when I was in high school, but eventually there was so much code *cough* ADS *cough* TRACKING *cough* that was trying to run that it wouldn't load properly and was basically useless. I had debated about setting them up with some sort of internet through a wireless carrier, but when the pandemic hit and they had to go into town to see what the status was of their unemployment checks, that was the straw that broke the camels back. It took a couple months of testing, figuring out how much they used each month and who was the best provider to use for their situation vs cost per month, but eventually settled on verizon's 150GB prepaid hotspot plan, which was perfect for them. The fact that I had to do this to begin with was just sad, but when you live out in the sticks the billion dollar companies dont care cause you wont bring enough revenue to make it worth it.

[grawman]

Glad to see people actually realize this happens. A lot of people live where they simply can't get internet or, if they can, it's horrible. Loads of people act like the infrastructure is there when it isn't

[daylonrogers]

As someone who lives in a rural village in Western Alaska, I can confirm that it takes 14-18 hops for our internet to reach us via radio towers stationed in distant villages. The best consumer package is 10mb down and runs about $150 a month.

[jonathanmartin]

"But hold the phone!" - I actually paused and took off my glasses to facepalm to that one properly. The phone puns in this one... wow. Loved it.

[AleksandarMiladinovic]

I remember that there was an option for satellite internet used only for downlink, and dial-up was used for upload. The plans were much more affordable and the equipment was less complicated, as bidirectional link was not necessary. Maybe some people still use such services in some rural areas, and statistically, they still use dial-up?

[krasht]

1% of 38 million is 380k, not 38k, which is significantly more than what you put in the video.
Having the source indicated would also be neat. Statista says it's actually 2% as of March 2020.

[nucklemonkey]

Starlink is literally life saving for my family. Frontier was our only option and when we ditched them they ended up getting sued. The amount of times they came to "fix" our internet with duct tape is pathetic

[granitesilverwing]

For a time maybe 20ish years ago, if you downloaded the 'free but limited internet' Juno or NetZero browser, you could dig through your network settings while connecting and find the phone number it dialed-- at which point you could configure windows to dial a direct connection and bypass the browser limitations, giving you actual free, unlimited internet. As a kid back then, these were good times.

[arcticblue]

I used dial up fairly recently because it was the only way to remotely manage a commercial refrigeration system for a client of ours at work. While it wasn't the internet, I did feel kind of nostalgic dialing in to that system. Reminded me of dialing in to my local library's card catalog system back in the 90's.

[toaster]

Im quite surprised that stationary 4g/5g internet isnt that much of a thing in the US.
its a pretty common and cheap alternative to DSL or Cable internet here in austria, especially for rural areas.

[MatheusPratta]

A few years ago the town I live in only had very expensive DSL from a single company (one major provider here in Brazil), that always said they couldn't offer anything better due to technical limitations and constantly had issues too, such as bad speeds and connection simply dying randomly. Eventually a much smaller local provider ran fiber everywhere and took pretty much all of their customers with much cheaper internet (you'd get 100Mbit for what you paid for 2Mbit before). Only then they started running fiber around but I guess it was just too late...

[sythex]

After experiencing Google Fiber I absolutely REFUSE to move anywhere unless it offers said ISP. I mean seriously 1, 000mbps up and down for $70 a month is unreal.

[tildessmoo]

I work as a mechanic in PA, USA, and until about 2 years ago, the computer that connects us to the state database for emissions inspections used dialup, so I'd bet there's still some other places that use dialup for legacy infrastructure reasons. (That computer also still used 3.5" floppies, which had to be replaced sometimes, because a full disk made the inspection program crash. I think the unavailability of replacement 3.5" floppies is the only reason the state upgraded.)

[nd-place]

You sound surprised by free dial-up. When I was a kid, we had a never-ending supply of CD-ROMS arriving in the mail with free hours for AOL, Compuserve, EarthLink, Prodigy, NetZero, etc. I don’t think my parents ever paid for internet when I was a kid.

[truth]

I love that you took the time to cover this issue. My wife and I travel to Pennsylvania once a year to visit her family. Whenever we go out there we have no cell service or internet. Thankfully Netflix lets you download episodes now so at the end of the day I can watch some form of entertainment. But it's a real issue. Thanks so much for what y'all do.

[toybarons]

I'm in Canada. Everything you said is true. I've lived in the same spot for 30 years. Major telecom really had little interest in improving internet service and I was a dial up user until just 5 years ago. Thankfully the province I live in took initiative 10 years ago to bring stable internet to everyone. This wasn't immediate. It got a boost when the county I live in deemed internet as an essential service. Then suddenly the major telecommunication company that has serviced my area since before I moved here, the one who always told me it would be too costly to provide decent internet, suddenly was able to provide a cell tower to my area. So up until 5 years ago I was a dial-up user. Now I am a wireless mobile user and BOY! is it a huge difference. Yes I could still get by if I had to use dial-up but it would be painful. Wireless internet has really, really improved the quality of daily living for me.

[jeanxlaxon]

3:30 . Hilarious! Give that editor a raise!