Are there many people still using dial up?

Ranicand

I have never had a PC connected to Dial up.

Was it really that bad?
And how many people still use it?

bealtine

Ranicand wrote: »

I have never had a PC connected to Dial up.

Was it really that bad?
And how many people still use it?

Yes quite a few still have to use it.

carbsy

When I signed up with Indigo in um 1996/7, I think.I had a Pace 28.8 Modem and was downloading compressed files about 3KB/sec.I was delighted!

*EDIT* After jogging my memory now.It was no easy task to get the internet working in those days.I remember having to mess with TCP/IP stacks and change numerous things before I had it working properly.

Also, first time I used the interweb was internet relay chat in Cork RTC (CIT now) in 1993.I was hooked from the minute I first connected to wildcat internet services! Oh and that text based Lynx browser which I found quite funky.

clearz

Ranicand wrote: »

I have never had a PC connected to Dial up.

To bad you never got to experience the liberation of switching from Dial-Up to 512Kb Broadband for the first time.

Ranicand

clearz wrote: »

To bad you never got to experience the liberation of switching from Dial-Up to 512Kb Broadband for the first time.

I started on 150k from NTL.:D

carbsy

clearz wrote: »

To bad you never got to experience the liberation of switching from Dial-Up to 512Kb Broadband for the first time.

And what a feeling that was!

Feidhlim

I had oceanfree or something like that - was a free CD that came with the newspaper.

Started on a modem which was approx 18k if I recall. Upgraded to a 56k thinking that would make a difference.

It didn't.


Was averaging 1.5kb/s

Happy with that if it remained stable which it never did... And assuming I could connect at all.


Download a song in an hour or so. It was also very expensive. I was only allowed on after 6pm.

watty

I had 300 bps X.25 via dialup pad in 1986. But only fax & telex sending via London Gateway and email. No WWW :-) All plain text.

carbsy

watty wrote: »

I had 300 bps X.25 via dialup pad in 1986. But only fax & telex sending via London Gateway and email. No WWW :-) All plain text.

Ah if we're going back before the interweb, I used to access Amiga BBS's alright with a 9.6k iirc.Bloody cost a fortune though! That was prob circa 1989/90.Only got my first computer in 1985, Commodore 16. I have it up in the attic still along with Kevin Toms Football Manager!

I remember roaring crying when I came home with Footall Manager as there were no stick man graphics like on the screen shots on the back of the cassette box.I rang up the computer store, still in tears to find out the screenshots were from the spectrum version! Still haven't gotten over it.

clearz

I remember you could get a 30 day trial of IOL in xtra-vision around 1996. It came with its own dialler instead of the Windows default one. This was the only dialler that worked on my computer and the 30 days lasted 6 months. That was the only 6 months of Internet I had in the 90's.

carbsy

clearz wrote: »

I remember you could get a 30 day trial of IOL in xtra-vision around 1996. It came with its own dialler instead of the Windows default one. This was the only dialler that worked on my computer and the 30 days lasted 6 months. That was the only 6 months of Internet I had in the 90's.

Ah yeah, I remember that.It wasn't the full internet though iirc? It was a cut down AOL version? Seems to ring a bell with me anyhow.

*EDIT* Eeeks! That was AOL!

crashoveroid

Well i had Esat no limits which was free between 6 to 6 so i became a serial dowloader the then managed to get an album a week.LOL

carbsy

crashoveroid wrote: »

Well i had Esat no limits which was free between 6 to 6 so i became a serial dowloader the then managed to get an album a week.LOL

Ah how could I forget that! I eventually graduated to it and was one of the lucky one's who wasn't cut off during the infamous cull.

Cabaal

carbsy wrote: »

Ah yeah, I remember that.It wasn't the full internet though iirc? It was a cut down AOL version? Seems to ring a bell with me anyhow.

*EDIT* Eeeks! That was AOL!

No the IOL 30 day CD's in the likes of compustore were full internet, you got full net access an a e-mail from iol.ie in the form of [email]6387fsafs@iol..ie[/email] which was deleted after 30 days.

If you used AOL in Ireland you paid through the nose as its a UK ISP so you may have either dialed their UK numbers or their roaming Limerick or Dublin numbers which came with surcharges of something like £2 per min. :eek:

I myself started off on Tinet (Telecom Eireann Internet - http://www.tinet.ie/), used that for many years and then switched to Esat Surf No-Limits....I was one of the 2k users kicked off and I remember posting about on ie.comp about starting a user group that later became known as Ireland Off-Line.

I happened to get access to a Ireland On-Line paid account then and I still have a nice short @iol.ie e-mail address still active with them to this day

bealtine

Cabaal wrote: »

I remember posting about on ie.comp about starting a user group that later became known as Ireland Off-Line.

It's all your fault so:)

Rockn

Yeah dial-up was great. Half an hour to download an mp3. No chance of watching streaming video. Nevermind the actual dialing up part.
Let me just quickly google* that... beep-boop-boop-beep-boooooop-burrrrr...




*yahoo

bealtine

Rockn wrote: »

Yeah dial-up was great. Half an hour to download an mp3.

http://www.sonnyradio.com/dialupkid.htm

For a blast from the past

Harps

Had a 56k line back in the day, was delighted to get anything above 3kbps, could only use it after 6 in the evening and only had 30 hours a month. It could take literally hours to download a song and watching videos was unheard of

Those were the days

jimmycrackcorm

Ah. Brings me back to the days of eirpac and 300 baud modems.

Earthday

I am one of them

Shamo

Ah the good old days of Ocreanfree then onto IOL no limits. Thank god for that or i'd have been kicked out the house if anymore huge phone bills came through.

Constantly left on overnight downloading, got the phone call but managed to stay on it. Online gaming was fun, want to make sure an application wasn't checking for updates during it or lag city.

moonboy52

I cringe when i think back to dial-up. No happy memories here.

Getting charged per minute, watching a web page slooooowly load etc.

Progress is wonderful as i am now paying roughly the same money for 400 times the speed .

Thank you UPC!

watty

I'm getting zero packet loss, x420 speed and spending about €800 a year less (including line rental and voice calls as well as Broadband) compared to 2002.

Digiweb Metro.

Podgoricka

GET THE HELL OF THE INTERNET IM TRYING TO USE THE PHONE! wow i havent heard that in about 5 or 6 yrs.. not to mention this famous sound

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

dub45

You had to buy your own modem too:)

And remember the scams where they hijacked your dialler and you were connected to some "foreign country"and you were getting bills for hundreds even thousands of euros?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/117890/ireland_cracks_down_on_internet_scams.html

Owen

Oh the memories of my C64 and its 300 baud modem. I also have an Apple IIe modem still in its box from 1978.

carbsy

dub45 wrote: »

You had to buy your own modem too:)

And remember the scams where they hijacked your dialler and you were connected to some "foreign country"and you were getting bills for hundreds even thousands of euros?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/117890/ireland_cracks_down_on_internet_scams.html

Oh aye dub45.I can remember Eirc0n making a packet (pardon the pun heh) from these scams!

watty

Still happens.

Also variations are now done to Mobile users with MMS and SMS scams.

Cantona's Collars

The sister in law is still on dial-up.Just a few short miles from town and her internet connection is back in the stone age.Soon to be changed as a new isp has coverage in her area now so bye bye eircom and their shoddy service. While my broadband isn't the fastest,it's light years ahead of hers,she's amazed that I can download and stream at the same time. Did anyone else have the Unison internet kits that connected to your tv? I won one in the local paper when they had a competition to promote them.For some reason I could connect and use internet free of charge with it,those were the days.

Yawns

My god this reminds me of when we had NTL dialup. It was free but the only thing you had to do was reconnect every 2 hours.

Used to play Delta Force on it man. Just had to aim about 20 ft in front of the enemy. I got so used to it as a sniper with the 50 cal

Even when cable bb came out my parents wouldn't change over. No No you have the internet for free why should I pay for the other one. Ahhh bless now I have my own place and bb in even if I am stuck with dsl

tazzzZ

i remember playing enemy territory on my dial up. think i was with utv. ending up being one of their first customers to have bb 512k. member downloading at "crazy speeds" and all the advertisements of up to 10x the speed of current dial up. etc etc. good times

CyberGhost

clearz wrote: »

To bad you never got to experience the liberation of switching from Dial-Up to 512Kb Broadband for the first time.

Yea, it was an incredible feeling, 51.2KB/s!!!!!!!!!!

I even have a screenshot saved from 2003, when it shot up higher than that for a little while.

jay93

Had dial up bout 7 years ago connected to my windows 98 pc that i got as m first computer how times have changed since then!!i just plugged it into the line and it worked straight away wasnt even expeting it to work also didnt cost all that much.the mad noises it used to make dialing up haha

watty

All the people with Mobile are using dialup. Technically. It connects via dialup protocol.

Doylers

I remember downloading itunes (not that long ago) and it took about 6 hours for me to download it lol Fist time we go BB was with the eircom free trial, I played halo on my xbox for days it was AWESOME!!

AntiVirus

Checking out porn with dial up was a real killer, the pictures would slowly load eventually revealing the goods!

jay93

watty wrote: »

All the people with Mobile are using dialup. Technically. It connects via dialup protocol.

yea true but dial up had limited speed 3G can go alot faster than dial up depending on area and congestion on the cell etc:D:D

watty

It can go slower than 2 ch ISDN and always has worse packet loss.

Ping is never good (80ms is abysmal) and 200ms+ is common

Drops connections and loses sessions like Analogue POTS dialup (ISDN doesnt)
May not connect at all (Just as Analogue Dialup, but not ISDN).

It can be fast. But you can't guarantee that ever. It's technically a dialup protocol just like ISDN or analogue POTS.

Fat_Fingers

Ah.. Good (horrible) old days.
14kb modem
IOL account (or was it something else, can’t remember anymore)
Windows 95
Netscape browser
Yahoo.com
.. and absolutely nothing on the internet!

Used to drop connection all the time. When you were on the internet nobody could use the phone . And it used to cost a fortune in a phone call charges!!

carbsy

carbsy wrote: »

When I signed up with Indigo in um 1996/7, I think.I had a Pace 28.8 Modem and was downloading compressed files about 3KB/sec.I was delighted!

*EDIT* After jogging my memory now.It was no easy task to get the internet working in those days.I remember having to mess with TCP/IP stacks and change numerous things before I had it working properly.

Also, first time I used the interweb was internet relay chat in Cork RTC (CIT now) in 1993.I was hooked from the minute I first connected to wildcat internet services! Oh and that text based Lynx browser which I found quite funky.

I think I was with IE EUnet (can't remember the correct name) briefly, they charged you an annual fee and a per minute charge on top of the per minute billing of eircom! rip off.

Then Internet Eireann whose lines always seemed to be engaged. They went bust and were taken over by Indigo. They were then later bought by eircom. I don't miss dial up at all.

Zynks

Does anyone reember the name of Boards predecessor? There was a BBS somewhere here in Ireland, but the old memory is letting me down.

I also experience the X25 back in 1990, and telex before that - I could even read some of the perforated tape to do the REAL cut and paste

Ah, my first home modem was a high end 9600 bps US Robotics. I hated that dial up sound....

yuloni

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Cabaal

Condi wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

Basically Esat launched a so called "unlimited" dialup package that allowed users to connect at off-peak times for as long as they wanted for a flat rate monthly fee.

esat basically took a chance that the market would change and this package would then become profitable for them...eventually, however the problem is the market didn't change!

Basically if a user connected at 6pm and disconnected at 7am in the morning it was actually costing Esat money as they had to pay eircom, in short the problem was comreg for not changing the market and forcing eircom to change how it operated.

Basically Ireland never really did have a FRIACO setup like OFCOM setup in the UK

Thats it afaik, perhaps Watty can correct me if I'm wrong on the above

watty

Pretty much correct.

Sadly there is STILL no true flatrate dialup. Dialup (even on 128kbps dual channel ISDN) while cheaper for eircom to provide than DSL is charged at higher rate, you can't get a dedicated dialup modem line for less than DSL.

Satellite is the most expensive Internet access. Dialup is the most expensive Internet access in Ireland today even though more than 50,000s can't get DSL. Yet in real terms it costs eircom maybe 1/100th of cost of DSL data. We have the most expensive Line rental in the World. Satellite bandwidth is the most expensive communication medium in real costs in the world. Yet Irish dialup Internet costs more.

Comreg has not done their job on this yet. Even the current LLU is 10 years too late. DSL itself is now becoming obsolete as FTTC + VDSL is really now the minimum and DOCSIS 3.0 Cable or Fibre to the Home should be the targets.

patrickmooney

Good ole dial up. I used to work for IOL/Esat/Oceanfree back in the day (well still work for them, but we're BT now). I still have my IOL Gold account and @iol.ie email address (which I still use every day).

Memories, I loved that IOL NoLimits product, but would often have to fall back to IOL Gold when the lines rang engaged. The fun of that.

I last used my gold connection about a year ago, when both Cable and DSL went down.

Oh the memories of dial up.

Daemonic

clearz wrote: »

To bad you never got to experience the liberation of switching from Dial-Up to 512Kb Broadband for the first time.

Ahh what a day that was, little blue usb modem arrived from UTV Internet, the speeds...happy days.

Then I moved to a new place and it took 6 months to get a phone line so I tried dial-up again, gave up after a day. Surfing teletext was more fun than trying to use the internet over dial-up after having broadband.

BEASTERLY

watty wrote: »

Pretty much correct.

Sadly there is STILL no true flatrate dialup. Dialup (even on 128kbps dual channel ISDN) while cheaper for eircom to provide than DSL is charged at higher rate, you can't get a dedicated dialup modem line for less than DSL.

Satellite is the most expensive Internet access. Dialup is the most expensive Internet access in Ireland today even though more than 50,000s can't get DSL. Yet in real terms it costs eircom maybe 1/100th of cost of DSL data. We have the most expensive Line rental in the World. Satellite bandwidth is the most expensive communication medium in real costs in the world. Yet Irish dialup Internet costs more.

Comreg has not done their job on this yet. Even the current LLU is 10 years too late. DSL itself is now becoming obsolete as FTTC + VDSL is really now the minimum and DOCSIS 3.0 Cable or Fibre to the Home should be the targets.

Is LLU happening in Ireland yet? Or is just planned , afaik the rental was droped from €8.41 to 77c , big difference but have any companies such as vodafone actually invested in the network themselves yet?

watty

yes, Esat was first, years ago, before BT bought them.

Smart (now Digiweb) and Magnet did a bit and Digiweb did a little, quietly as it was loss making.

The only investment was some backhaul (very little) because eircom's was ATM and expensive and the actual shelf of DSLAM in the exchange.

No actual investment in the phone network as such other than a some by eircom, but a fraction of what the owners skimmed out. So none of the investors in eircom did net investment. They all stripped in one fashion or another.

A very small % of lines are LLU. Since eircom owns that actual lines and exchange forever...

Most of the non-eircom spend related to DSL may be payments to eircom and marketing.

BEASTERLY

watty wrote: »

yes, Esat was first, years ago, before BT bought them.

Smart (now Digiweb) and Magnet did a bit and Digiweb did a little, quietly as it was loss making.

The only investment was some backhaul (very little) because eircom's was ATM and expensive and the actual shelf of DSLAM in the exchange.

No actual investment in the phone network as such other than a some by eircom, but a fraction of what the owners skimmed out. So none of the investors in eircom did net investment. They all stripped in one fashion or another.

A very small % of lines are LLU. Since eircom owns that actual lines and exchange forever...

Most of the non-eircom spend related to DSL may be payments to eircom and marketing.

Ok thanks.

It has worked brilliantly in the uk , I just see you can get o2 LLU with 8.2mb ''unlimited'' broadband for £7 a month:eek:

Yakuza

A friend of mine had a 300 baud modem that went into the joystick port of his Atari 800, we were mucking around on something called (I think) DUBBS, circa 1985-86?

Roll on another few years (c. 1993) and I remember shoulder surfing DeVore as he navigated around the WELL and various IRC channels and some very basic web sites on his trusty USR 14.4k. When he went gallivanting around Europe that summer, he lent me that modem, and when I had to give it back, I went and bought a *ta-da* USR 28.8 one. Heaven.

Roll on another few years, I bought a new PC with a built-in 56.6 k modem but DeV still used to kick the sh1t out of me at Quake with his 128k ISDN line - I remember my jaw dropping when I saw it connecting *instantly* at 128k, without the old familiar *bup*bup*bup*bup*bup*bup*bup*squeak*whine*whirr*squeak*rumble of dialup (and then praying you'd get a decent (high 40's) connection, instead of the 33k it fell back to).

Finally, in early 2001 (while living in Madrid) I got a 256/128 Kb line from Telefonica which was unmitigated pleasure. In 2002, back in Dublin, I got a 512/128 Kbline from Eircom, cost something outrageous like 90+VAT per month but it was worth it )

Today am on the 15 Mb/768Kb profile, stll with Eircom but will probably move to UPC, esp if they bring out 100mb in the near future.

yuloni

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