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Comment by dlivingston | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised it's still being offered period! My parents live in a remote area outside of a rural town in one of the USA's smaller states, and even they haven't had dial-up in ~15 years. We grew up with dial-up until about 2010, when they switched over to (absolutely terrible) satellite internet. HughsNet, I think it was called. Two-ish years ago they switched over to Starlink and it's been working well (when it does work, anyway).

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Apparently they just shut it down in 2024, but a couple of years ago I tested an Atari 1030 modem by dialing out to Earthlink, and it still worked -- successfully connected at 300 baud.

I worked somewhere with a small office run over Hughesnet. Some sort of upload-over-dial-up, broadband-download-over-satellite, with 1500ms latency for everything.

I know people just a couple hours from Seattle that still use dial up.

Most are older and don't want to spend the obscene prices for satellite, cellular signal isn't good enough out there.

Is dial up still at 56kbps?

As far as I know.

(I haven't personally had dial up in about 20 tears.)

Still over the phone lines, so yep. Extremely lucky if you get that on old copper though.

Yes. It's a hard limit for old phone lines because they're limited to something like 3.1 khz.

The channels themselves are limited to 64k (like, that's what they are digitally) and then the signaling over analog channels steals a bit, bringing you to 56k.

And that assumes you have damn near a perfect phone line. Any interference along the line is probably going to knock you down to 33.6. I wonder if they keep stats on that.

In some neighborhoods, the equipment wasn't able to support 56kbps so 33.6 was the best available. That's how my parent's house was. Too far away to get DSL. Lines were too noisy for 56.6. My parents tried HughesNet at one point, but it was shite. Starlink would have been a good option, but they eventually strung fiber to the area before Starlink was still an idea on paper.

I don't know how anyone can use the modern internet with dial up. It's got to be useless for all but email.

I think that's basically what they use it for.

Sites that work well with lynx are OK on dial up.

I'm sure HN is perfectly usable over dial-up as well.

For comments, yeah but to read any of the links would probably take a while.

You guys are reading the links?

I know a few news sites have low bandwidth versions, which are arguable way better than the auto-play video and ads plastered across their “normal” sites.

A couple examples:

https://lite.cnn.com/

https://text.npr.org/

I recently got throttled to ~1Mb/s for going over my mobile data allotment (which incidentally got me to finally switch to an MVNO), and I was amazed at how insufficient a speed that was once considered “broadband” was in 2025. It was basically unusable; sites took 20-30 seconds to load and scrolling a timeline was an exercise in futility.

I literally cannot imagine 56K on the modern web.

I used sub mb internet on a cruise and the ping wasn’t even that bad but trying to load anything other than HN was a real pain. 56k was pretty bad even back then, don’t even know how it would be remotely usable today.

Only if the email client is set to not download images.

The telecom hasn't tried to get them on DSL? There's subsidized low income programs for it (or where, idk what the status is now) so I can't imagine the cost was much higher. And if I were an ISP I might eat the cost of the upgrade just to avoid support complications for a small set of customers.

Around me, near Seattle, some of the DSLAMs are port limited. If you want DSL, you've got to wait for a port to open up.

DSL isn't available at all to them. The phone infrastructure in their neighborhood is ancient, there's zero cable.

Comcast and/or Century Link would be willing to set the neighborhood up, for a pretty sizable fee.

Here is an excellent use case for SPA web apps. See - a lot of low bandwidth connections still exist in the US.

(Sorry to slightly hijack the thread. It's been an ongoing debate on HN)

How does this make sense? SPAs have notoriously large bundles shipped to the client. Maybe in a PWA where the service worker gets saved for offline use.

Traditional server-rendered HTML should be orders of magnitude faster than most SPA bundles though.

For content-driven sites - absolutely.

I'm talking about long-lived apps where work is being accomplished. An SPA allows downloading and caching al or most of the frontend, then further communication can proceed using minimal bandwidth as the user works.

With traditional SSR, every page/form the user navigates to requires downloading all markup, styles, and client-side behaviors for that route.

Each time I was on a limited connection, regular pages would load, slowly. Anything SPA would fail to load.

I'm willing to believe SPAs with everything handwritten, containing just the necessary code, could work but that's not how SPAs are usually written.

Not only this but very simple HTML with POST forms, in addition to being lightweight, benefit from a very robust handling, where you can retry stuff and all. SPA are usually bad at this.

All markup needs to be downloaded but it might be very light, and styles are hopefully cached, so it's an issue on first load only and SPAs don't solve this.

With a dial-up connection, you really want a native app that only hits the network for functionality that fundamentally needs to be done over the network. And you want the app to be hitting stable APIs, rather than requiring weekly updates to keep it in lockstep with a front-end server's constant development churn.

Or a terminal UI, since that usually worked well back when dial-up was common.

>SPAs have notoriously large bundles shipped to the client.

I haven't found this to be the case at all. What apps are you using?

>Maybe in a PWA where the service worker gets saved for offline use.

You know browsers have caches, right?

Exist, yes; a lot, no. Dialup accounts for around 0.25% of households with an Internet subscription according to the 2019 census: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2019.B28011?q=ACSDT1Y20...

Wow, there's more people with no internet than still on dial-up.

That's a good case for offline-first apps (served from cache and localStorage/indexedDB via a service worker).

Although native downloaded apps will probably be more usable & familiar in that case.

DSL is expensive to install and has a limit on distance from a central office. Any new construction today would be fiber instead of copper anyways. I've seen fiber being strung in remote mountain valley where DSL/cable were unavailable. The area was just too far for DSL and the equipment in the CO wasn't up to snuff for it, and cable just never felt enough customers were there to justify running the cable. Everyone in the valley had the old school large satellite dishes. MaBell finally decided to run fiber instead, and there was much rejoicing.

Web pages and emails have gotten so bloated, how do you even use the internet over dialup as a consumer?

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