Still on Dialup?

[Anapan]

I know some guys who live further from civilization than most, who can only access the internet from Dialup due to necessity/price-for-crappy satellite access. Nothing else is available at any reasonable cost (Last I heard $180-$200 a month for something reasonably fast without a transfer cap that makes Netflix an option). I've been working with one of them to make it so a cellphone signal gets multi-beamed from the top of a mountain to the bottom of the valley via a community donation for hardware so their cellphones will work and everyone can use 3/4G to access the interweb and make phonecalls, but progress has been slow - most of them don't care that there's any such thing as an interweb and twitters anyway - they're there to be unplugged.

I thought this was a small cluster of people up here in northern BC surrounded by mountains.
Then I just read this story:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/08/technol ... index.html
2.1 million?

So the real question is:
Who's viewing Racketboy on their Dreamcast? If you're out there, you win the internet. I think that's pretty cool!

I tried to make a pile of wires with a 9-volt AC-DC transformer, an old laptop, and a software package that would allow dialup to make it so my DC could do internet. I failed. I must've messed up some of the PPPoe settings. My PSO adventures never made it online...

Now I'd really like to see a picture of this. Can someone post a pic of their Dreamcast viewing Racketboy through a CRT?

[Ziggy]

So I guess we should continue to use the (56k death!) tag in thread titles?

That CNN article counted just AOL dial up users. I wonder what the true number of dial up users in the country is. AOL isn't the only way to access the internet.

That article also made it sound like such a gloomy situation. It's true that websites are assuming you're on a high speed connection, but a certain amount of settings and plug ins will fix that. I mean, you're not streaming YouTube on dial up, so Flash should be disabled by default, then auto streaming videos and most ad banners wont bother you.

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iccQZCxDd60
(Skip to 11:25 if you're impatient)

[SpoonyBard]

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=41609&start=1520
(towards the bottom of that page)

I posted this when I got my PC-DC server running in January. It's broadband converted to 56k through a windows 98 PC. I live in the sticks, but not so far that high speed isn't an option. 56k really is the route to go with Dreamcast.

There are spots in my neck of the woods with no high speed access. There are less and less of them each year - but dial-up only spots still do exist. A friend of mine just became town supervisor on the platform of getting high speed access in his area. Within a week of him being elected our local DSL provider installed lines right to the end of his driveway. Crazy how that works.

[fastbilly1]

My inlaws were on dial up until two years ago when they got hughesnet. Whats worse is that they live in a valley far from a cell tower. So it is hughesnet or dialup, period. We experimented with a cell repeater up on a hillside for awhile, but never got it to work consistently.

[BogusMeatFactory]

When I worked at Blockbuster for the longest time, I would get into arguments with people over this. They seemed to believe that every person in the United States had access to high speed internet. Huge portions of the midwest and mountain regions have restricted access to this stuff, having to rely on Dialup or the egregiously expensive satellite that, in all honesty, is not much of an improvement.

Drove me nuts. They also were people that said that we are overpopulated in the United States and that there is no countrysides any more. That we are so overcrowded that there is no place to farm. It was a college town... college students are... weird.

[Ziggy]

Until recently (maybe a couple of years ago?) GameStop was using dial-up for their CC machines. A lot of places still do.

[fastbilly1]

Until recently (maybe a couple of years ago?) GameStop was using dial-up for their CC machines. A lot of places still do.

Most CC machines built since 2010 can take a RJ11 or RJ45 handoff for POTS or VOIP. But you are right, alot of CC machines and Fax machines are still dial based. But you would be surprised what old telecom equipment is still in use. Heck I ran into a car repair shop a couple years ago who had a key system in place.

[ExedExes]

I was on dialup until 2007. Dark days, they were.

[ninjainspandex]

heh I played World of Warcraft from 2005-2008 on dial-up

[Forlorn Drifter]

Its not very hard to find somewhere where dial up is the only option. Most people live in a decent sized city, or near a decent amount of smaller towns where the option to get high-speed internet is pretty available. But then again, I can take a 20 minute drive and go out where you can only get dial up.

I don't get how people are so surprised by this. There's still a pretty large amount of places where you can be 100 miles from the closest town, and only get mail once a week.