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dragos240
April 12th, 2010, 12:28 PM
So I found a free dial up service, and got a number, username, and password. So free internet for me. How slow is dial up in reality. Is it really that slow? Is 56k really bad? How long would it take to load the cafe? I just want to try it for the lulz.

Swagman
April 12th, 2010, 12:31 PM
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dragos240
April 12th, 2010, 12:34 PM
Anyone here still use it? :lol:

itreius
April 12th, 2010, 12:41 PM
Anyone here still use it? :lol:
If there is anyone using it, you'll have to wait a couple of hours until their message arrives at the server.

tica vun
April 12th, 2010, 12:44 PM
If there is anyone using it, you'll have to wait a couple of hours until their message arrives at the server.

Haha. I use a free 56k dialup service at my family's vacation house because it's the only internet service available there. It's not that bad as long as you stick to just browsing. Although you should get used to waiting. I usually have adblock block all images and just load the ones I want to see, that speeds things up a bit.

RiceMonster
April 12th, 2010, 12:49 PM
Slower than RMS in a lake of molasses.

XubuRoxMySox
April 12th, 2010, 12:56 PM
So I found a free dial up service, and got a number, username, and password. So free internet for me.

I'd be very interested in that! We're on satellite Internet here and it BITES. Could you please PM with the name and website of this free dialup service?

Thanks,
Robin

dragos240
April 12th, 2010, 01:11 PM
Haha. I use a free 56k dialup service at my family's vacation house because it's the only internet service available there. It's not that bad as long as you stick to just browsing. Although you should get used to waiting. I usually have adblock block all images and just load the ones I want to see, that speeds things up a bit.

I think I'll try this sometime.

Irihapeti
April 12th, 2010, 01:12 PM
I used dialup for a couple of years. 18 months of that was with Ubuntu.

Upgrades took the most time. A kernel update would take a couple of hours, for instance. I got around this by setting up some scripts so that I downloaded updates overnight.

I don't think you would be doing any testing of new releases, somehow. :)

dragos240
April 12th, 2010, 01:13 PM
I'd be very interested in that! We're on satellite Internet here and it BITES. Could you please PM with the name and website of this free dialup service?

Thanks,
Robin

http://www.dialupforfree.com (http://www.dialupforfree.com/)

dragos240
April 12th, 2010, 01:14 PM
I used dialup for a couple of years. 18 months of that was with Ubuntu.

Upgrades took the most time. A kernel update would take a couple of hours, for instance. I got around this by setting up some scripts so that I downloaded updates overnight.

I don't think you would be doing any testing of new releases, somehow. :)

Actually I'm using debian testing. :p

itreius
April 12th, 2010, 01:15 PM
http://www.dialupforfree.com (http://www.dialupforfree.com/)

http://www.419legal.org/fradulent-website/66304-dialupforfree-com-fraud-false-misleading-advertising.html

Irihapeti
April 12th, 2010, 01:16 PM
Actually I'm using debian testing. :p

I stand corrected, then. :)

sxmaxchine
April 12th, 2010, 01:17 PM
if you want to know how slow it is then read on.

when they made xp they tried to stop or at least slow down piracy by adding an encrypted copy of microsoft bob into xp and xp wouldnt install without those encrypted files. and that file was only 30 MEGABYTES.

demosthene1
April 12th, 2010, 01:34 PM
I occasionally use a free dialup service and when I do I use Opera and turn turbo on - uses Opera's servers and compresses image-page files. It loads pages quickly. Of course doesn't do anything for downloading large iso files, music or video files.

Here is the free dialup website:
http://www.fastfreedialup.com/
This service is truly great! It is better than any paid dialup service I've used.

CharlesA
April 12th, 2010, 01:34 PM
Is taking 30 minutes to download a 3 meg file slow?

dragos240
April 12th, 2010, 02:06 PM
I occasionally use a free dialup service and when I do I use Opera and turn turbo on - uses Opera's servers and compresses image-page files. It loads pages quickly. Of course doesn't do anything for downloading large iso files, music or video files.

Here is the free dialup website:
http://www.fastfreedialup.com/
This service is truly great! It is better than any paid dialup service I've used.

Only problem is that I don't live in california or any of the states listed. So I couldn't use that website.

dragos240
April 12th, 2010, 02:09 PM
http://www.419legal.org/fradulent-website/66304-dialupforfree-com-fraud-false-misleading-advertising.html

Well, that won't affect me because my step-mom works at verizon, and we get our phone service for free. Even long distance is free. So any use of the phone will always be free for us. :)

howefield
April 12th, 2010, 02:09 PM
Is taking 30 minutes to download a 3 meg file slow?

If I remember correctly, 5 minutes was about right for 1 meg on 56k dial up, so I'd say 30 minutes for 3 is slowwww.

However, if you are talking about a free service, difficult to complain :)

forrestcupp
April 12th, 2010, 02:46 PM
Don't plan on installing updates or anything from the repos. Browsing is the only thing you'll be doing, and even that will be very painful.

One thing to keep in mind is that people design web sites now for broadband because it is so widespread. When dial-up was popular, people designed web sites differently to make their pages load much faster. Remember those annoying tiled backgrounds from the 90's? They don't worry about that stuff anymore.

But if you already have a modem and don't have to pay money for a new one, you won't be out anything.




However, if you are talking about a free service, difficult to complain :)I'll give you a free kick in the crotch if you want. And I don't wanna hear any complaining. ;)

Khakilang
April 12th, 2010, 02:53 PM
I use dial-up was to read and send mail and msn. Unless there is some important info I need to find out than only I will browse the net. No downloads and try to block pop-up and ads. You are talking about 56Kbps and when you come across some popular website and traffic congestion will occur. Unless you have specific need or surf only certain website than I guess it should be ok. After all its free. You can test it first and decide later.

CharlesA
April 12th, 2010, 03:37 PM
If I remember correctly, 5 minutes was about right for 1 meg on 56k dial up, so I'd say 30 minutes for 3 is slowwww.

However, if you are talking about a free service, difficult to complain :)

I think that it was transferring at 15K/sec. Gotta love dial up.

sudoer541
April 12th, 2010, 04:15 PM
For Canadians: www.295.ca (http://ubuntuforums.org/www.295.ca)
The service costs $3 a month.


btw is there such thing as free broadband/WIFI/Satellite?
(I am sure no such thing exists, especially here in Canada)

wojox
April 12th, 2010, 04:21 PM
Well, that won't affect me because my step-mom works at verizon, and we get our phone service for free. Even long distance is free. So any use of the phone will always be free for us. :)

Your step-mom works for Verizon home of Fiosinternet and your hooking up dial up?

wojox
April 12th, 2010, 04:25 PM
For Canadians: www.295.ca (http://ubuntuforums.org/www.295.ca)
The service costs $3 a month.


btw is there such thing as free broadband/WIFI/Satellite?
(I am sure no such thing exists, especially here in Canada)

There's TiSP (http://www.google.com/tisp/)

dragos240
April 12th, 2010, 04:32 PM
Your step-mom works for Verizon home of Fiosinternet and your hooking up dial up?

Sadly, we only get phone service free. Not free FiOS. But hey, free phone is better than nothing.

Swagman
April 12th, 2010, 04:33 PM
It got to be more expensive to be on dial-up than on a broadband package here in uk

samalex
April 12th, 2010, 05:54 PM
So I found a free dial up service, and got a number, username, and password. So free internet for me. How slow is dial up in reality. Is it really that slow? Is 56k really bad? How long would it take to load the cafe? I just want to try it for the lulz.

I could work as long as you know what sites to avoid and tweak your browser. First disable Flash since MANY sites bring my surfing to a crawl with all those dang Flash ad's even on broadband.

Also try to avoid mom-and-pop sites because so many of these are designed by rookie 'website developers' (and I use that term VERY loosely) who have no clue how to compress images. So you could have a 300x50 logo that's 500K large, and for sites that run 3-5 Megs in size just due to graphics it'll be a nightmare.

I take it you're running Linux so you can install Squid proxy server (http://www.squid-cache.org/) and surf through that so it'll cache website images for you so even if you do visit sites with large graphics, it'll download the image and load it from cache. Also from a security standpoint, be sure and secure your box with iptables because dialing into the Internet generally leaves you open... which is even more critical with server apps like Squid open. Make sure your stuff is locked-down before dialing out.

You may also want to tweak your email client to not download large emails and set it to only check every 15-30 minutes instead of every 3-5 minutes. Also most email clients can get just the email headers or not download the attachment, so you can enable that incase you get lots of attachments. Imap is another option if your email server supports that.

For news and information, dial-up is actually good enough for RSS feeds, so get yourself a good RSS aggregation program and get your news and info that way. Doing this will avoid you from having to visit TONS of sites just to get the latest and greatest info.

As for other content that will work great on slower connections, here's a few places you can hang-out for a fulfilling Internet experience that won't drown your connection:
- Internet Relay Chat
- Usenet or other NNTP-compliant forums
- Telnet BBSes (yes they are VERY much alive)

But things you can pretty much write-off:
- Streaming audio and video
- Podcasting
- Image sites like Flickr
- Any site that depends on Flash
- Online classes through college

About two or three times a month you will want to visit a restaurant or cafe with free Wifi though just to get your OS updates because anymore they're just too large for Dial-up. Also you can save your big downloads for visits like this.

But yes Dial-up will still work, but you have to know what you're getting into. Honesty I think the WWW is overrated, and there are LOTS of ways to get info outside of visiting websites, which is the main reason most people want/need broadband (that and streaming audio/video).

Anyway, just my two cents on the topic.

Sam

cascade9
April 12th, 2010, 06:10 PM
dragos240- debian testing + dialup is a bad mix IMO. D/ling updates would be painful. Doable, but its going to take a long time. Stable works better, nowhere near as many updates to d/l.

I was using dialup a lot up untill about 18 months ago. Its slow, but its useable.... big images were a bit painful, and the only way to play a flash video was to hit 'play, then 'pause'....then wait....a lot....then play (or just hit 'replay' once the video ahd finished).

I was doing about 3-4GB a month on dialup, most months. Its slow, but if you are prepared to let stuff d/l all night you can still get a lot of stuff that people think 'you cant get on dialup'.


If I remember correctly, 5 minutes was about right for 1 meg on 56k dial up, so I'd say 30 minutes for 3 is slowwww.

However, if you are talking about a free service, difficult to complain :)

5minutes for 1MB is stil pretty slow for dailup. If you are doing other things (browsing websites) at the same time, undertandable though. It should be about 3mintes LOL.


I think that it was transferring at 15K/sec. Gotta love dial up.

1.5k/sec I think you mean. Even then, it should only be about 12-15mintues.

Matthewthegreat
April 12th, 2010, 06:10 PM
There's TiSP (http://www.google.com/tisp/)

I looked at the FAQ and there is no linux support yet :(

lisati
April 12th, 2010, 06:21 PM
The last time I used dial-up was as part of an exercise troubleshooting my ADSL2+ connection last year. Painfully slow. It turned out to be a problem at the ISP's end. Even the connection speed I get when my ISP throttles me back for exceeding my monthly data allowance is better than when I was using dial-up regularly.


Here is the free dialup website:
http://www.fastfreedialup.com/
This service is truly great! It is better than any paid dialup service I've used.

From their terms and conditions:

The user has no legal right or recourse to any damages resulting from any use of this service.
Are they allowed to do that?

sydbat
April 12th, 2010, 06:23 PM
The last time I used dial-up was as part of an exercise troubleshooting my ADSL2+ connection last year. Painfully slow. It turned out to be a problem at the ISP's end. Even the connection speed I get when my ISP throttles me back for exceeding my monthly data allowance is better than when I was using dial-up regularly.


From their terms and conditions:

Are they allowed to do that?In the US - yes. Because you have signed a contract.

malspa
April 12th, 2010, 06:33 PM
I really didn't mind using dial-up because of the money I was saving. A high-speed connection here costs me a lot more than what I was paying for my dial-up service ($5.50 per month, no contract) and a land line. I was able to do everything that I needed to do. If I had to get big updates from Synaptic, I could do them while I was sleeping. Smaller updates were no problem, as far as I was concerned. Dial-up is no big deal if you're a patient person. The extra $$ saved means a lot when you're on a tight budget.

Well, met a woman, end up moving in with her, and she made it clear that dial-up was too slow for her! :lolflag:

So, ya gotta do what ya gotta do. But I miss my dial-up days every month when I pay the bill for this high-speed connection. :cool:

Warpnow
April 12th, 2010, 06:40 PM
Opera's turbo feature or whatever its called to load imaes at lower quality will greatly improve load times when using dial-up.AOL did it for forever, it was a contributing factor to their popularity...same speed, but AOL loaded pages faster than the competition.

sudoer541
April 12th, 2010, 07:39 PM
I looked at the FAQ and there is no linux support yet :(


TISP is fake. It does not exists...Google April foolz lol!!!

But seriously is there any free broadband ISP in Canada?
What about WIFI?

wojox
April 12th, 2010, 07:46 PM
I looked at the FAQ and there is no linux support yet :(

:lolflag::lolflag::lolflag:

standingwave
April 12th, 2010, 08:13 PM
How slow is dial up in reality. Is it really that slow? Is 56k really bad? How long would it take to load the cafe? I just want to try it for the lulz.Kids these days. :P 56K is a lot faster than the 1200 baud modem I used back in the good old days.

Irihapeti
April 12th, 2010, 09:32 PM
Kids these days. :P 56K is a lot faster than the 1200 baud modem I used back in the good old days.

Young whippersnapper! When I was a kid, all we had was tin cans and string :)

gemmakaru
April 12th, 2010, 09:54 PM
Think of a Lada Riva 1.2 towing a caravan, up a hill. Ok that would be impossible. (My dad had one when I was a kid oh the shame).

Irihapeti
April 12th, 2010, 10:10 PM
Think of a Lada Riva 1.2 towing a caravan, up a hill. Ok that would be impossible. (My dad had one when I was a kid oh the shame).

Oh, no! Spare us the Lada jokes ... :)

The Real Dave
April 12th, 2010, 10:24 PM
Use a caching proxy like Squid, block images and scripts with Ad-block and No-Script, and it'll be fine for browsing. I've only had broadband for a year, and I still remember dial-up.

Updates would hurt. Hurt badly.

ISO, Movies, Youtube etc, just forget about it >.< Be prepared for Google Images to take a minute or more to load.

But by using something like Squid, you can cache a lot of the backgrounds and images in sites, which will speed up browsing time incredibly :)

Doctor Mike
April 12th, 2010, 10:45 PM
I use to give away free dial up service when there was very little dsl adsl service to be found. Unless you had deep pockets and were within 3 miles 5 km of the source... faster services were not going to happen. There are still regions where this is the norm... A good Cache and a classic downloader that resumes will make overnight download possible. Bittorrent is being attacked on many fronts so old school methods might just be useful to more than just dial up users.

-grubby
April 12th, 2010, 10:50 PM
For 56 kbits, you're looking at 7 kb/s and probably some horrendous latency. There's a reason it's free.

drreed
April 12th, 2010, 10:58 PM
If there is anyone using it, you'll have to wait a couple of hours until their message arrives at the server.


*grin* (and an accurate bit of sarcasm too)


I think you should do it. I think everyone who's never experienced dial-up should do it just to see what it's like. I doubt if he could find a service that will handshake down below 56k, but I could be wrong. 56k btw, is a super fast modem. Imagine what it was like at 2400, or 1200. I know a few older guys that still have a 300 in their garage somewhere, the kind you put the phone handset on!

You're probably going to have to stick w/ .edu archives, and places like "The Internet Oracle," where simplicity is still valued. There isn't much left out on the web that's small. Everythings big now.

Due to cross-platform compatibility and the "gee whiz" nature of everything technical, I don't hear much about people optimizing anything anymore. Even the dumbest-*** game (like farmville) is big these days.

Maybe someone still runs a bbs you could dial into. I think there are a few die-hards in that scene.

drreed
April 12th, 2010, 11:01 PM
if you want to know how slow it is then read on.

when they made xp they tried to stop or at least slow down piracy by adding an encrypted copy of microsoft bob into xp and xp wouldnt install without those encrypted files. and that file was only 30 MEGABYTES.

Bob?

That would be a truly evil practical joke. :lolflag:

Imagine booting up your computer and being greeted by MS Bob!

Frak
April 12th, 2010, 11:13 PM
Are they allowed to do that?

No. Not legally. Contracts only exist until tort law comes into effect. If they caused a $1000 phone bill, claiming that the number was local, they have stepped into tort law. No "you cannot sue us" contract is legal.

Doctor Mike
April 13th, 2010, 12:00 AM
*grin* (and an accurate bit of sarcasm too)


I think you should do it. I think everyone who's never experienced dial-up should do it just to see what it's like. I doubt if he could find a service that will handshake down below 56k, but I could be wrong. 56k btw, is a super fast modem. Imagine what it was like at 2400, or 1200. I know a few older guys that still have a 300 in their garage somewhere, the kind you put the phone handset on!

You're probably going to have to stick w/ .edu archives, and places like "The Internet Oracle," where simplicity is still valued. There isn't much left out on the web that's small. Everythings big now.

Due to cross-platform compatibility and the "gee whiz" nature of everything technical, I don't hear much about people optimizing anything anymore. Even the dumbest-*** game (like farmville) is big these days.

Maybe someone still runs a bbs you could dial into. I think there are a few die-hards in that scene.Please don't talk about below 1200 baud it's like pulling hairs from places I would like to mention, but would get Modies disease...

forrestcupp
April 13th, 2010, 02:11 PM
Imagine what it was like at 2400, or 1200. I know a few older guys that still have a 300 in their garage somewhere, the kind you put the phone handset on!

That's back in the days when the real geeks were sysops running their own BBSs from their homes, and you could only get on them at certain hours of the day.

Those were the good old days, but I don't necessarily want to go back. A couple of years ago, I spent about $600 on a new computer and I installed a full screen C64 emulator on it (I don't remember which one that was). I couldn't remember what the keystroke was to close it, so I ended up having to do a hard shut down. When I started the computer back up, for some reason it kept booting directly to the C64 emulator. I thought that I had just spent $600 on a Commodore and I wasn't very happy. I finally figured it out and found a better emulator.

Uncle Spellbinder
April 13th, 2010, 02:25 PM
Even for free, I wouldn't use dial-up unless there was no other option available where I live. In this day-in-age with YouTube, streaming radio, movies and such, dial-up is useless. Like using 2 tin cans connected by string instead of a phone.

dragos240
April 13th, 2010, 02:28 PM
Is there a way I can limit the speed coming from my router to my computer. So it seems 56k slow?

aklo
April 13th, 2010, 04:28 PM
wow been more than 12 years since i use a 56k and i'm 24 now.

anyway 56k used to gave me a constant 5.5KB/s ...Max at only 6KB/s
Also i remembered mine come with a plan of like 30 hours per month....

Text based site was ok...but i hightly doubt you can find any pure text base site now..except forums.

You will have no chance @ youtube unless you are very patient....

samalex
April 13th, 2010, 04:32 PM
I still think getting online using an analog modem is still viable if the OP understands the caveats. It's like riding a bike compared to driving a car or taking the train. You're limited on where you can go but you can still go places.

Sam

_h_
April 13th, 2010, 04:37 PM
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php

have fun. xD

Uncle Spellbinder
April 13th, 2010, 04:57 PM
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php

have fun. xD

:grin:

That's about is interesting as watching paint dry!

forrestcupp
April 13th, 2010, 07:19 PM
Is there a way I can limit the speed coming from my router to my computer. So it seems 56k slow?

Firefox Throttle (http://www.uselessapplications.com/en/Application/FirefoxThrottle.aspx) can do that. But unfortunately, this and other programs like it are only available for Windows.

You might be able to install the Windows version of Firefox and install this addon through that.

swoll1980
April 13th, 2010, 07:26 PM
Imagine a snail crawling through a pool of super glue. The actual transfer rate on a dial up connection is like 8k/sec

forrestcupp
April 13th, 2010, 08:00 PM
Imagine a snail crawling through a pool of super glue. The actual transfer rate on a dial up connection is like 8k/sec

More like 7k/sec. But in my experience, I don't think I ever actually got 56k out of any ISP I've used. It was always more like 4k/sec and 5k if I was lucky.

Lol. I remember being excited about 5.0K/sec downloads! :) I even ran a brand new phone line straight from the box to try to get it to work faster.

I'm glad those days are over.

Frak
April 13th, 2010, 10:09 PM
More like 7k/sec. But in my experience, I don't think I ever actually got 56k out of any ISP I've used. It was always more like 4k/sec and 5k if I was lucky.

56Kb ÷ 8 = 7KB.

It's a serial connection, so it's measured in bits, not bytes. To get the byte value, divide the claimed speed by 8. That's why a 10Mb connection yields only 1.25MB/s.

JDShu
April 13th, 2010, 10:16 PM
noooo 56k.... I remember being so stoked when broadband prices became reasonable. Though now that I think about it, I was playing stupid things like netmonsters, Red Alert, and later Neopets when it first came out... browsing digimon information sites on geocities. ICQ was also useless, it took what felt like ages to send one IM. Hmmm... maybe i would have done better in school if I hadn't been wasting so much time LOL.

forrestcupp
April 14th, 2010, 01:15 PM
56Kb ÷ 8 = 7KB.

It's a serial connection, so it's measured in bits, not bytes. To get the byte value, divide the claimed speed by 8. That's why a 10Mb connection yields only 1.25MB/s.

That's why I said "It's more like 7K". I meant kilobytes. ;)

What I was saying was that in actuality, I never got the full 56K connection I was supposed to get (which is 7 kilobytes/second). I normally could only pull about 4KB/second. And that was from multiple ISPs at multiple locations.

RJARRRPCGP
April 14th, 2010, 02:48 PM
More like 7k/sec. But in my experience, I don't think I ever actually got 56k out of any ISP I've used. It was always more like 4k/sec and 5k if I was lucky.

Lol. I remember being excited about 5.0K/sec downloads! :) I even ran a brand new phone line straight from the box to try to get it to work faster.

I'm glad those days are over.

A typical healthy 56k is 5.0 KB/s =40kbps or 44 kbps.

cascade9
April 14th, 2010, 02:59 PM
That's why I said "It's more like 7K". I meant kilobytes. ;)

What I was saying was that in actuality, I never got the full 56K connection I was supposed to get (which is 7 kilobytes/second). I normally could only pull about 4KB/second. And that was from multiple ISPs at multiple locations.

Odd. When I was on dial-up, I considered 5k/sec to be a not-that-great connection, 6k/sec (or higher) to be good. Anything less than 5k/sec and I'd start looking for problems.

I know I've pulled down files at 6.5/7k/sec quite often with dialup.

HermanAB
April 14th, 2010, 03:13 PM
Browsing on dialup is fine if you use Adblock. You can also get a huge improvement by installing squid-cache and a DNS slave.

elianthony
April 14th, 2010, 05:58 PM
Browsing on dial-up is very doable. I did this for almost 2 years, all with Ubuntu. I ran updates selectively. The smaller ones I ran whenever they came up, the larger ones I let go overnight. Some things to consider.

-Use Opera w/turbo. It is the fastest. Also, it has a nice blocking image feature. I blocked images on pages I frequently visit and the page load times drastically increased. This is built into Opera and works great. You can pick and choose which images/ads to block.

-Downloads are very possible, even large ones, just know that you won't be doing anything else online while they're running.

-Instead of going to news sites, use the RSS service. It lets you browse the stories in no time at all. Ridiculously faster than going to the news site itself.

There are a few other things you can do to increase performance, such as modifying the MTU, etc. If you're going to be stuck with dial-up, these little tweaks are well worth the time.

elianthony
April 14th, 2010, 05:59 PM
You can also get a huge improvement by installing squid-cache and a DNS slave.
Definitely!

malspa
April 15th, 2010, 02:52 PM
-Downloads are very possible, even large ones, just know that you won't be doing anything else online while they're running.

I was able to continue with web browsing while I was doing downloads. It slowed things down, but it still worked.

samalex
April 15th, 2010, 03:34 PM
For those of you who do have dialup access, who do you use? Until just a few years ago I used a company called SysMatrix (http://www.sysmatrix.net/) here in Texas who offered dial-up for $10.95/month with available numbers from pretty much any city in the US. I've had broadband at home for years, but having a dial-up provider was great for at work, at family's houses, or when traveling before Wifi was so popular, but I canceled it when most hotels started offering free Wifi. The only time I wish I still had it was when we visit the inlaws.

For anyone looking for dial-up access I highly recommend those guys, but who else is out there? Does AOL still offer dialup access? And do you still have to use their crappy client? There were a few local companies to my area that offered pretty good dial-up access in the 90's, but all have since disappeared. Even TimeWarner, who I have my broadband through, pulled their dial-up servers a few years back.

Sam

malspa
April 15th, 2010, 05:21 PM
For those of you who do have dialup access, who do you use?

Up until a few months ago, I was using 550Access. $5.50 per month unless you get the acceleration. No contract. I used it for a few years, so I guess I was a happy customer. I'm all about saving a buck, and I'd go back to it right now if I could get away with it and not have to put up with the complaints from the woman and kids.

Bobmnh
April 20th, 2010, 01:52 AM
I used dialup for a couple of years. 18 months of that was with Ubuntu.

Upgrades took the most time. A kernel update would take a couple of hours, for instance. I got around this by setting up some scripts so that I downloaded updates overnight.

I don't think you would be doing any testing of new releases, somehow. :)

Could you lead me in the right direction to bring up the dialer in Ubuntu 9.10? This is only days old to me.

Thanks,
Bob M

Irihapeti
April 20th, 2010, 07:42 AM
Could you lead me in the right direction to bring up the dialer in Ubuntu 9.10? This is only days old to me.

Thanks,
Bob M

I used to use gnome-ppp, which you would have to install through synaptic, or, if you don't mind the terminal,
sudo apt-get install gnome-ppp

A big question will be if your modem will work in Linux. Some do and some don't. It's a matter of looking around, asking questions and maybe just trying it out. If it's based on a Conexant chip, you are in with a chance. I think that some other types also work.

I'm probably not the best person to ask, because it's over a year since I last used dialup and I haven't used it in anything later than 8.04. I'd suggest asking the question in Absolute Beginner Talk or General Help.

samalex
April 20th, 2010, 02:03 PM
Could you lead me in the right direction to bring up the dialer in Ubuntu 9.10? This is only days old to me.


I used to have a dial-up shell script I used back when I only ran shell (no GUI), so I'll see if I can find it and post it. That was with Red Hat 7.x so I don't know if it'll work in Ubuntu though.

Also someone else suggested verifying your modem works, which in my laptop (as with so many) the modem is a softmodem/winmodem that just won't work well with Linux. I'm really hoping they've got it working in 10.04 because in 9.04 and 9.10 it didn't work.

Sam

robertcoulson
April 20th, 2010, 02:08 PM
There is a way to double the speed of dial up....Telephone cables have loading on them...If you bypass the loading, your connection will speed up noticeably...BUT, your voice transmission and quality will degrade.
Robert

samalex
April 20th, 2010, 02:15 PM
There is a way to double the speed of dial up....Telephone cables have loading on them...If you bypass the loading, your connection will speed up noticeably...BUT, your voice transmission and quality will degrade.
Robert

I think that only applies for ISDN where you had data and voice lines separated. For a standard ma bell analog line there's no way to get more speed out of it except with compression, but I think they've tapped about as much out of it as they can with modern modems. Those software packages many dial-up ISP's used to sell are just fancy proxy servers with caching, which anyone can setup using Squid.

Sam