Search
Who will mourn the death of dial-up?
Who will mourn the death of dial-up?
September 02, 2013
Beep-beep-beep-beep ... ring-ring, ring-CLICK, bzzzrrrrcscscscsssshhh-doiiiing-doiiiing ... you are now connected.
As older readers will remember, for years that was the sound of the internet. Back then, getting online wasn't a matter of simply flipping open your laptop or tapping the screen of your iPad.
You had to use a dial-up connection. This meant making sure your external modem (pictured) was switched on, checking nobody else was using the phone, then opening the connection on your computer and clicking connect.
After enduring 30 seconds of annoying fax machine-type noises, you'd be on the information super-highway, as we used to call it back then.
Starved of bandwidth
If you were lucky, your internet connection might hit the heady speeds of 56 kilobits a second. (For comparison, a typical broadband connection is about 100 times faster.)
At this point I was going to say that those were the days. Except they weren't. With barely enough bandwidth for low-quality streaming radio, YouTube was an impossibility, and every website took its time to load.
It wasn't all bad though. You could pass the time by guessing what images were of while they slowly resolved themselves on screen.
Oh, and you could play 'guess the phone bill'. With many services charged by the minute, it was common to ration your time online.
Dial-up is ending
These days, most of us are lucky enough to have a broadband connection. And while broadband in the UK has its faults, it has revolutionised the experience of using the internet.
Broadband has become so ubiquitous that when BT announced the end of its dial-up internet service last week, the most surprising thing was that it has kept it going for so long.
But while the vast majority of UK internet users moved to broadband years ago, there's still a small minority of people — mostly in rural areas — who are unable to get broadband.
BT says only a 'tiny number' of its customers were still using its dial-up service when they discontinued it, but has acknowledged that around 1,000 people won't be able to move to broadband because it's not available where they live.
Other dial-up options
And that's the thing. On the basis that any connection is better than none, dial-up does still have its uses. For people in areas not covered by broadband, it's often the only cost-effective way to get online. It can be handy in an emergency too.
For these reasons, the days of dial-up aren't quite over. Although BT no longer offers the service, a few other providers do:
- BT's subsidiary, Plusnet, continues to provide a dial-up option to its customers
- Free UK ISP and Free Dial-Up provide services the you can connect to and go, though we've never heard of them and so can't comment on their quality.
- Freeola also offers a dial-up service.
If you're in need of a dial-up connection, it's good to know they are still available. But speaking for myself, I'll be happy if I never hear that noise again.
Small business technology advice, tools and resources | IT Donut
Copyright © 2010-2016
Comments
I wish I could find a legitamate review of dial-up. What dial up used to be and what it is now are different experiences it seems. When i was little, there was a user-cap. It was a local company that was using equipment that was so new and so unknown, and it's no wonder it was pretty slow. Most plans i see now have some kind of accelerator. The short descriptionis that there's file compression somewhere, sending those packets, and decompression happening on your computer. I would think your computer would also cache files that are commonly used on frequented sites. There's a good chance you're not using a computer from the mid 90's, so that would also be a major difference.I see a lot of negativity towards dial-up, but when i read their reviews, they all try to skype or download media. That's like going back to your bicylce and seeing if it will pull the same weight as your truck does. You have to re-arrange your online interaction, just like a biker does. Checking facebook less, being on the internet on an as needed basis rather than a digital media umbilical cord. Dial-up almost seems like a liberation to me, and not the headache that people are complaining about.
I was just checking to see if it's still possible to get a dial-up connection only to learn that all the major providers have discontinued it (plusnet just a couple of weeks ago as it happens), and the only thing I've been able to find thus far are these 'free' providers where I assume you pay per minute. Yes, broadband of course is more practicle, but once you've been alerted to the dangers of electromagnetic radiation and the potential ill-health effects of being exposed to it 24/7, and not only from your own router......I'm picking up eleven other networks right this moment (and I live in a residential area not a high-rise or a block of flats). If I could find a provider that did dial-up for a tenner a month or so, I would definitely revert to it, but it doesn't appear to be available any more. But it wouldn't surprise me if - as more and more people wake up to the dangers from electromagnetic radiation - there will be an increasing demand from the public for the big companies to make it available again. I certainly never found it a problem during the years I was using it, and who cares about having to wait for it to dial up for a few seconds. In the meantime the router gets turned off when not required, and I would advise everyone to do so, and especially through the night (or whenever you sleep).
Modern computers cannot use dial-up anway. No PCI ports for an internal modem, and no serial ports on the back for an external modem.
When I started working, the company had one email address and a dial-up connection. We would only dial-in to check emails a couple of times a day and if we knew something 'big' was being sent the connection was left open overnight.
Those days are long-gone and it is funny how archaic that all seems. But there were some benefits. These days we feel bereft if our broadband connection dips out briefly or is less than supersonic. Our email in-boxes ping constantly with something or other demanding our immediate attention and we all anxiously check our smart-phones and mobile devices for messages - no matter what time of day or night.
I do wonder if one day we will come to miss the ability to be 'off the radar' or whether things will continue a-pace until we all burn out.
Add a comment