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Comment by bbcbasic | Hacker News Reader

Amazing I remember the "tune" that the modem makes from back in the day but never realized how much stuff was going on. I never knew a custom connection was being made each time, but I guess that makes sense as not all phone connections are equal. Has anyone tried to use a dial up model recently? Do the telephone lines still support it, or has anything changed on the exchanges that would stop a modem working?

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Many credit-card POS terminals still use dial-up. Ever wonder why they take so long to authenticate?

Moreover, about 3% of Americans still use dial-up as their primary Internet connection.[1]

[1] - http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/3-of-america...

ATMs as well.

Apparently still alive and well in some circles (agree with below that most uses are financial/credit/legacy apps). I worked at one of the largest developers of ISP modem infrastructure in the late 90's called Ascend. Company was purchased by Lucent. Just a few years ago I ran into a friend still with the company and mentioned that, globally, carriers were still installing new dial-up infrastructure to the tune of a few $100-million annually. Amazing.

That kind of handshaking goes on all the time. Pretty much the same thing happens when you plug in a USB device, it's just less analog.

A lot of lines here in Australia will still support it (some at only ~31.2kbit due to copper quality) but when you sign up to ADSL you can order a "naked" service with no dialtone, which can be cheaper in some cases - there'll be no dialup fallback if you do that, though.

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