• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Anoyone use Dial-Up connections Anymore?

tblake05

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 21, 2017
Messages
295
Location
Minnesota
Yes, They were sucky in the mid to late 90's when we were stuck with them. (especially me growing up with the painfully slow 5 Kbps download rate of songs on napster). BUT, as dumb as it may sound, I am putting together the same workstation I had as a kid right down to puky dial-up, mediocre late 90's PC, and windows ME. Just to enjoy the BSOD once again.

So my question is, after all these years, is there a way to essentially "dial up" to a home broadband router over wifi or Ethernet? Is there some network adapter to do this.

Aside from re-living my teen years listening to peal-jam on Napster and Instant messaging my girlfriend at the time over MSN messenger (who is now my wife) using dial up. This sort of network adapter would be also useful in connecting older PC's to the internet if they only have a modem (Which I have a few laptops of the time I'm working on).

Any Thoughts? Thanks!!

Mods, sorry if my question is in the work section, please move it if so. Thanks.
 
I think I actually have a Netgear RM356 (if I am remembering right) that was a router that used a modem for its WAN connection...
 
My ISP still offers me a dialup login even though I'm on their fiber plan. I'm alotted two hours worth of connection time each month and can dial in from any of their local numbers. Yes, I occasionally use it when I do not have access to wi-fi.
 
Far more on dial-up than you'd think. There are areas in the county I live not served by Cable or DSL. Satellite is too expensive (not to mention the caps), and that leaves about a good 1/3 with dial-up or nothing. I'm one of the fortunate few on what AT&T euphemistically calls U-Verse. What they don't tell you is that the distance to my house limits me to about a 3MB connection. Barely passable DSL speed.
 
You might be more likely to have a faster speed on your phone when broadband internet on your computer in the unpopulated areas of the country.
 
You might be more likely to have a faster speed on your phone when broadband internet on your computer in the unpopulated areas of the country.

Maybe....if there were any towers close enough to get a signal. Literally just 1 bar (and no 4G) on my cell phone at home.
 
My ISP still offers me a dialup login even though I'm on their fiber plan. I'm alotted two hours worth of connection time each month and can dial in from any of their local numbers. Yes, I occasionally use it when I do not have access to wi-fi.

I wish most ISP's would offer this.
 
So my question is, after all these years, is there a way to essentially "dial up" to a home broadband router over wifi or Ethernet? Is there some network adapter to do this.
The network adapter is your serial port - you can use a null-modem cable to connect to another machine. Apart from a PPP server (such as pppd or slirp), the other machine can also pretend to be a modem. The required software is small enough to install on a router, otherwise a Raspberry Pi (or similar) will do just perfect.

I have used slirp to connect Windows 3.1 running inside DOSBox to the internet, with the host tunneling PPP over TCP. As far as Internet Explorer 3 (which has a decent dialer) was concerned, it was a true dial-up connection.

This sort of network adapter would be also useful in connecting older PC's to the internet if they only have a modem (Which I have a few laptops of the time I'm working on).
It is not easily possible to connect two modems directly to each other, since they require the telephone line voltage. There are simple circuits providing these 48~105 volts (up to 135 V when ringing). After the connection is established, you only get a transparent link (similar to a null-modem cable), though. A null-modem cable is easier to deal with.

Aside from re-living my teen years listening to peal-jam on Napster and Instant messaging my girlfriend at the time over MSN messenger
Keep in mind that even the internet of the late 90's did not require downloading dozens of megabytes just to show a bit of text and could deal with bad connections. The dial-up experience with today's web is borderline painful - modern tech giants with stable GbE-links simply do not care. While many developing countries (e.g. most parts of Africa) never had dial-up technology (because no telephone infrastructure), they now rely on satellite links with limited bandwidth and high packet loss. The latter simply breaks modern web applications.
 
As far as I know, you can set up your own home ISP simulator using a PBX connected to some modems, with the modems connected to a system (Unix or Linux most likely) providing PPP or SLIP. Used PBX systems are fairly easy to find used, or you can build yourself a software-based PBX using software like Asterisk, running on a PC with a couple of POTS line cards.

I haven't ever done any of this myself, but I understand it's possible.
 
What I (and perhaps some other folks) would like to know is that; now that dial-up is mostly disused, due to less network activity, is it more reliable/faster?
I've been tempted to get a dial-up service as a backup (I live in a 4G only zone, no other options but dial-up) but I just don't know if it'd be worth it.
 
What I (and perhaps some other folks) would like to know is that; now that dial-up is mostly disused, due to less network activity, is it more reliable/faster?
I've been tempted to get a dial-up service as a backup (I live in a 4G only zone, no other options but dial-up) but I just don't know if it'd be worth it.

At a maximum download speed of around 4kbs, a modern-day web page would just about choke down anything trying to access it through a 56k modem...
 
What I (and perhaps some other folks) would like to know is that; now that dial-up is mostly disused, due to less network activity, is it more reliable/faster? I've been tempted to get a dial-up service as a backup (I live in a 4G only zone, no other options but dial-up) but I just don't know if it'd be worth it.
I have set up an ISDN connection around 2007, and even the very weak and heavily overloaded 3G network was much faster for downloading a decent web browser. For e-mail (the main purpose), it was okay.

That said, dial-up is like connecting a shower through a straw: No matter how bad the piping is, the straw will be the main problem. Dial-up speed and reliability are limited by the quality of your phone line, not by the load in the ISP's network.

In Europe, the telephony system is moving to VoIP technology, which prevents modems from working reliably at all (due to timing issues). A semi-stable 9600 bps link can be achieved with a bit of luck, otherwise it is down to 1200 bps if the modems connect at all. While GSM is a reliable alternative (at 9600 bps), it is going to be shut down in the next years. Here, 56k dial-up has become a dream already.
 
... I'm sure a lot of us have a certain nostalgia for the song of the modem.

Think there's more nostalgia for the way the internet used to be (when it was "young and innocent"). The sound of the modem itself, however, likely drove many folks (including myself) nuts.
 
Think there's more nostalgia for the way the internet used to be (when it was "young and innocent"). The sound of the modem itself, however, likely drove many folks (including myself) nuts.

In certain ways I preferred Fido-net. The star topology made it easy to lock out trolls from the local net. It's amazing what you could accomplish on a BBS without a GUI. About the time I got out of Fido-net Excalibur had appeared, but it seemed a real PITA to set up. The other issue was Windows 3.x's cooperative multi-tasking didn't play well with BBS systems. It's true some sysops did tweak Windows so that it ran well, but most sysops without a dedicated BBS machine went different routes. I used DesqView/386 myself, and OS/2 was quite popular. I finally broke down and joined the GUI brigade with Win95 since it used pre-emptive interrupt driven multitasking. Interesting thing is that 32-bit NT console applications worked quite nicely under '95. All I needed to so after upgrading the OS was drop the NT .exe over the MS-DOS file. All the configuration & data files stayed the same.

...An LGR video I watched recently made me wonder: is it possible to telnet into a modern (9x or later) Windows system via serial port? At least for transferring files & such?
 
In certain ways I preferred Fido-net. The star topology made it easy to lock out trolls from the local net. It's amazing what you could accomplish on a BBS without a GUI.
Both FidoNet and BBS systems are still around and work fine. :)

I finally broke down and joined the GUI brigade with Win95 since it used pre-emptive interrupt driven multitasking.
There is pre-emptive multitasking for DOS applications and cooperative multitasking for GUI applications. No change from Windows 3.1, but newer applications tended to behave slightly better, with the concept of multi-threading being supported.

...An LGR video I watched recently made me wonder: is it possible to telnet into a modern (9x or later) Windows system via serial port? At least for transferring files & such?
Windows NT came with the RAS services, allowing one to dial in. Otherwise, there was HyperTerminal (or any other software) which could do those things. I know people who run a BBS on Windows 7/10. :)
 
I've got a dial-up setup running in my house. Avaya Definity PBX facilitates dialing/ringing (not the cheapest or easiest way to achieve this, something like an Avaya Partner/ACS, or a Panasonic KXTES824E are a bit more plug-and-play). An old Pentium 4 PC running Linux with a bunch of serial ports and external modems, mgetty (for dialup shell access) and pppd (for dialup networking) handles answering those modems and authentication.
EDIT: for clarification, I can only get 33.6kbps links, consumer modems on analog lines can only achieve 33.6k, you need a digital line and special modem on the server end to achieve 56k link.
IMG_1703.jpgIMG_1485.jpgIMG_1764.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJndYm6OW_Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGOGLezCuBk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLkINlXCd7c
 
Last edited:
EDIT: for clarification, I can only get 33.6kbps links, consumer modems on analog lines can only achieve 33.6k, you need a digital line and special modem on the server end to achieve 56k link.

That is correct. Consumer V.90 / X2 / K56flex modems could only handle up to 56k while receiving. Their transmitting speed was limited to 33.6k. ISPs used something like U.S. Robotics TotalControl MP/16 racks with custom firmware to reach those 56k speeds.

Although the last dial-up provider in my town died two years ago, there is still some use left for those noisy boxes with blinking lights. For example, two Couriers can connect to each other using HST over so poor long lines that nothing else will do.
 
Back
Top