dialup friendly

Old school computer columnist John C. Dvorak’s The Myth of Broadband looks at the idea that broadband doesn’t matter until most users have it. Right now, they don’t.

On the bright side, a dialup connection is much better now than it was two years ago. I don’t know if it’s hardware, software, or phone lines, but I remember not being able to listen to any useful streaming audio over a modem. Now a decent 56K dialup can sustain high-quality audio.

aov continues to be dialup friendly. Our frontpage varies in size, but is usually between 20K – 30Kb.

 

8 thoughts on “dialup friendly

  1. I have been using an Island Tel ADSL connection at home now for over a year and a half. This past weekend I moved to a new apartment (The Rental Market was so good I had to rent my house). I was thinking about getting high speed there but I thought that I would wait and see if I really needed it or not before I spent the extra 50/month. Turns out I don’t. I use my Laptop’s 56K modem and connect through my phone line to a dial up account. Having not used dial up for over 2 years I was amazed at the reliability and speed of it compared to back in the day. I am consistently getting 6-10K/second downloads. The most important thing to note though is that I don’t use my connection for bandwidth intensive applications. I don’t browse much while at home, and all I really use it for is email and ICQ. Long live dial up… Congrats to all of those technicians who remained faithful to the modem while we were all preaching high speed.

  2. Thanks Dan. You said what I was trying to say. Speaking of the myth of broadband, dialup guru Kevin O’brien of ISN has a new ranting and raving site of the Reinvented-RukavinaHennessey breed, humbly named KevinJObrien.com (I’m not suggesting you should invented a meaningless artsy-fartsy name for your blog Kevin).

    You’ll often disagree with him, but you have to give him credit for the sheer volume of his maniacal rants. The site is also peppered with comments from the PEI Internet oligarchy (hey peter, when do we get to reply to individual posts on reinvented.net). Kevin, welcome to the navel-gazing world of the web log.

  3. I have Dialup Phobia. There is no other way to explain the fact that I don’t think I would attempt to do anything on a dialup connection.

    Now, I am off to send Dan a couple e-mails with 2-3 meg attachments.. heh.. Eat that dialup.

  4. Luckily for me I have web mail to scan for those 2-3 mgb attachments 🙂

  5. Well…. problem with dialup is that most modems sold in new systems for the past three years, and most off the shelf modems for the past two years, are software modems. (For the uninitiated, in software modems the UART is part of the modem driver, not the modem hardware.)

    These modems are *MUCH LESS* reliable than even crappy hardware modems. We have more than 100 times the number of modem complaints today than we had three years ago yet our client base has only perhaps trippled and our modem servers have steadily gotten better — the remainder % increase is attributable *only* to software modems.

    So, bully to you guys who’re actually realizing better quality connections via dialup (I hope everyone of you subscribes to ISN). The biggest probs with software modems are: poor quality handshake negotiations, premature disconnects, fragmented memory or hard disk slows modem, and they are much more sensitive to poor quality phone lines or the presence of cordless phones.

    Good news for us is that we’re now able to confirm what everyone’s been talking about for the past month… It’s now official. ISN High Speed ™ commercial launched on cbc tv last evening. On-line signup will be open by the end of the week, hookups will follow shortly after.

    ISN High Speed service, using coaxial cable, is one hop from four OC-3 Internet upstream connections (each from unique suppliers for reliability). This system was designed for 99.99999% uptime. I hope it lives up to its billing (I’m sure you folks will let me know if it doesn’t.)

    Rates are not official as yet, but they will start (for certain) at $39.95 / month for residential and can range up to many $K per month for guaranteed service levels in the 10MB range. Also, all ISN High Speed ™ connections will come with a dial up account (for you purists).

    I’ve got my asbestos underwear on so go ahead… flame my ass for being so blatant with this commerical in your sacred cyberspot… but it is more or less relevant to the topic. (less?, well, ok fine then!)

    KJOB

  6. Steve wrote: “I’m not suggesting you should invented a meaningless artsy-fartsy name for your blog Kevin.”

    Yeah, anything short of “ActsOfViolence” would perhaps mitigate the Train motiff that Pete so aptly tagged me with.

    (Sheesh! Not only my spelling, but my grammer goes out the window when I don’t do this in a spell-checked window!)

    KJOB

  7. Dan, you won’t be able to help but download funny_fart_sounds.mp3 … Too tempting.

  8. I think you’re all wrong, the whole idea of the ‘Internet’ is just a fad.

    You’ll look back in ten years and laugh at ‘mo-dems’ and ‘TCP-one-P”.

    “Pbbsh, Internet, what was I thinking?”

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