You've got mail. >> For millions of people, those three
beautiful words were the next thing that we heard after.
And with the early excitement around communication over the information
superighway, it was almost a Pavlovian experience. But all good things must
come to an end. And on September 30th, 2025, AOL shut down their dialup
internet service for good. Truly a dark day for the thousands of customers who
still used it. Wait, thousands of people
in 2025 were still on dialup internet.
Not only were, but are. Believe it or not, for many people around the world,
Dialup is the only affordable option for exploring the worldwide web, downloading
over 121,000 software files, and investigating their special interests.
And according to the 2023 census, over
150,000 households, even in the US, are
still cruising the USA at [music] 56K.
But what can you even do on dialup these days? Can you browse Reddit? Actually,
probably YouTube? I doubt it. What about
gaming? Maybe. To answer all of those questions, [music] I did something that
I never thought I would do again.
Oh, it's for you. [music] Uh, it's a segue to our sponsor,
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with code ltt20 at checkout.
>> [music]
>> Can you even buy 56k modems anymore? Oh,
of course it would be start. Hard to find, made expensive. But how do we hook
it up? We don't even have a phone line here at the office, do we? No. No, we
did not. which is why we're at James' house, who turns out also didn't have a
landline, nor did he even have his RJ11 jack hooked up at the panel in his
garage. So, our new brighter wired it all up for him. And now that that's
done, all we've got to do is disable our vastly superior connections, plug in our
modem, and then figure out where the devil the dialup networking folder is.
Network probably, right? Oh my god, there it is. It's right there. How have
I never noticed it in all the years I've been using Windows 10 and 11? Now we
just double check our phone number and our ISP provided username and password
and then click connect. Oh, do the new
modems not make the noise? >> You got to make the noise yourself.
>> Now let's see how this bad boy handles some of the most popular websites on the
worldwide web. Before you ask, by the way, yes, we have cleared our internet
cash for the most authentic possible experience. For better or for worse, why
don't I Google Wikipedia? Oh god, this
is actually way worse than I expected. I thought this was going to be fine. Oh,
it timed out. Do I Do I have an internet connection in theory?
>> Oh god, 32 bytes. Request timed out. Did I just forget how horrible this was? I
may have tracked down our problem. While we did disable Windows update, MS Edge
Web View 2, whatever this is, is using anywhere from about 1 to 2 1/2 kilobytes
per second, >> which on this beat of connection, it's a
real problem. No. MP defender core
service.exe. What is this? It's part of anti-malware.
>> Dude, I don't got enough speed to download malware. I'm just trying to
load the main Wikipedia page. We did do a lot while we were waiting for internet
things to happen. I would leave a CD worth of MP3s to download overnight.
Hey, no wonder the homepage took so flipping long to load. It's got all
these pictures and stuff on it. Sick. What would a non-narcissist
look up on Wikipedia? My page should
theoretically be lighter. I think it only has one picture on it. Hey, there
it goes. Wait for it. Wait for it.
[screaming] Yeah, this is awful. And you know, as
you would expect, the more multimedia heavy a site is, the worse it's going to
be. As we all remember from browsing for pixelated poorer coupons back in [music]
the day. So, Wikipedia, if we're willing to wait a little bit, actually kind of
usable. How about ltstore.com? We're trying an alternate phone number to see
if maybe we can get a little bit more consistency in our connection here.
Store. Oh. Oh, >> I fixed it. I'm a genius. >> Oh, dude. Okay, we are getting more
consistent network activity. And if we were to try to go to a site like say
Amazon, it would only get worse, which
kind of makes sense given that rich media is such a huge part of any major
online retailer strategy these days with Amazon plastered with not only photos
like ours, but even animations and
video. This hilarious by the way, we finally got one image loaded here. the
cover image for the screwdriver. And check this out. Whoa, the mouseover
image for the backpack. So, it's very clear that the way that modern pages are
designed and the way that modern browsers load the assets is just
inherently incompatible with a dialup
experience. Some sites are text only out of the box or have a texton version.
Let's try old Reddit. As if anything posted on Reddit isn't an image or a
video these days. Anyway, I guess I could browse. Am I the Do I
really want to know though? Whoa, hold on. I got a favicon. Oh my god, I'm so
bored. I'm sunk cost fallacy as on this
right now. So much for this being text only as what is this? It's all pictures.
Well, that is where browser extensions like images on off come in. Sticking to
one tab also goes a long way and so does turning off non-critical service while
you're trying to browse. Looking at you, Windows update. Turning off images
directly within Chrome is also a thing. You just go to settings, content,
images, and click don't allow sites to show images. This was faster, actually.
Not a ton, but legitimately more usable.
And another tech tip for dialup users is that download managers are also, it
turns out, still a thing. These programs allow you to organize, prioritize, and
schedule your downloads. And they'll even let you pause and resume a download
without losing any data if you start a big one and you're not quite done and
you want to maybe I don't know browse the internet. Finally, I mentioned
earlier that there are textbased browsers that will display web pages as
well text. Let's fire up links, a text
and guey browser that only works in Linux, which we can quickly access using
Windows Subsystem for Linux. WSL.exe.
No way. You have got to be kidding me. This is
so cool. Now we can see exactly what was taking so flipping long before. Like
dude, it's not even trying to download anything yet. Makes it only slightly
less infuriating. >> I didn't even think of SSL being a
problem, but totally. Cuz that's a ton of data. >> Oh yeah. By these standards, that's a
flip ton of data. And not just with the website that I'm connecting to. Probably
with every tracker that it's using. >> Every tracker, every asset, every
everything. >> Hey. Hey. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Hey. Wo. Can
Can I use the site like this? Like, is this Oh, yeah. It's done. It loaded.
Wow. That is
something. This definitely explains why it took so freaking long with the
images. That's how long it takes just to get the text on the page. God, you
remember when a download would fail like at the very end?
>> Yes. >> Oh, heartbreak. Oh, it occurs to me at
this point that while we have experienced dialup, we haven't actually
measured it yet. Will a test site have too much imagery to load
and it stopped even trying. This is the point where I feel like we need to
adjust our plan a little bit because we did all the pre-esting for this using
Chrome developer tools to throttle our connection to a 56k modem speed. What we
didn't account for is that in the real world, a dialup internet service
provider might not get anywhere near 56 kilobytes per second, which we found was
a pretty regular problem. So, new plan. We're going back into the developer
settings, and we're going to use our throttled connection for the rest of
what we had planned today. Control shift I to access dev tools. Then you can add
a custom network throttling profile. Apparently, the average for 56k was
about 53 down, 48 up with anywhere from
100 to 250 milliseconds of latency and about 1.5% packet loss. So, that's what
we're going to be going with. Let's see how usable YouTube would be on a high
quality 56k connection these days. Well,
it's not great so far. Serenity now. Wo!
Wait, this took that long and we still have images turned off? I haven't even
tried to watch a video yet. Click. Nice.
Not unexpected. Of course, we weren't going to be able to stream highdefinition video on a 56k
connection. But hear me out. Hear me out. What about Oh, I thought I was
going to be able to change it to a more early webfriendly 144p, but I don't. It
didn't even load the player enough to give me a quality drop down. I just need
to get past it trying to load an ad cuz there's no quality selector for the ad.
Oh my god. Yeah, I would need ad blocks SO HARD.
SMART. >> WHOA, BUDDY. OH, h
>> streaming wasn't really a thing on 56K.
So, here's how we did it. You would load up the site for the video you wanted to
watch. You would go make a cup of coffee, tea, cocoa, maybe have a
sandwich, and you would come back to your computer and hope that it had
buffered enough for you to play it. If you look really closely, you can
actually see little chunks of video loading down here. So, I should be able
to play like the first half a minute already.
>> Hey, not bad. And actually, that would be pretty good quality back in the late
'9s. Another option would be to slow down the playback speed. Really? We're
going to suggest this? Try.5.
>> It feels like they might as well be just
guessing. I mean, I guess it kind of
helps with buffering, but I assume that's what I would sound
like drunk. As for sites like Netflix, forget about it. Their advertised
minimum is 3 megabit per second. 3 megabit pers is a whopping 50 times the
speed of our humble 56k modem. Gaming, it's going to be a whole other nightmare
of an experience. But before we get to that, why does this even still exist?
Well, 56k is exactly what it says on the
tin, 56,000 bits or between 6,000 and
7,000 text characters per second. And there are still use cases where that is
still more than enough. Some digital signage or vending machines or credit
card terminals do still function perfectly well on dialup. It can also be
used as a backup for older control systems that are difficult to upgrade or
maybe even as a tertiary connection for critical business needs. [music] In
fact, until 2009, the operators of America's nuclear power plants were
using dialup for their monitoring systems until the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission asked them to, hey, maybe modernize, which was probably a good
call, pun intended. As for why individuals are using it, well, mostly
it's because they don't have a choice. And in a world where the internet can
contribute so much to education and economic prosperity, that's a pretty sad
thing. In many developing countries, the funding for high-speed infrastructure
simply doesn't exist due to poverty or corruption. And [music] in America
specifically, what happened was the major ISPs took billions of dollars from
the government for a high-speed buildout, then just never finished it.
With all that said, for some folks, and this is going to blow your mind, they
just aren't that online and can't justify any extra cost for something
that they simply don't care about beyond basic text communication and email. But
I can't relate to that. Pretty much the first thing I wanted to do on the
internet was game. Can we do it? Oh god,
it wants a Steam update. [laughter]
Quiet you.
Okay. Yeah, play anyway for the second time. This is kind of remarkable. I I
thought the game would at least launch and then have trouble connecting to the
server, but maybe it's that if you can't download all the latest cosmetics,
modern live service games don't even want you. Actually, no. Realistically,
it's probably not that they hate poor people. Connection manipulation, which
can look very similar to a poor connection like ours, can be a way of
cheating. And even when it isn't, it can significantly degrade the gaming
experience for everyone else in the server. Why don't we give something else
a shot? [music] There are a few classic games that apparently do work and are
still actively maintained, like Vendetta Online. It's a space combat game that's
been running continuously since 2002 and was designed to be played with 200
milliseconds of latency. While this painstakingly loads, [music] an even
older game launched in 1997 that still works with dialup is Ultima Online. This
fantasy MMO RPG still has thousands of gamers playing it to this day. I don't
feel super compelled to join them at the moment, but I'm really glad that they're
having fun. >> We must have been way more patient back in the day.
>> We must have been so patient, dude. [music] Like my ADD is like out of
control now. I can't go like 30 seconds without like grabbing my phone or like
answering an email. What did I do? I snacked a lot more cuz I was a teenage
boy. >> That's probably what it was.
>> Oh, I don't know if this is loading anymore.
Oh, man. Okay. All right. So, I'm in the world now. How do I tell if anything is
actually working right now? How do I tell if anything online is happening?
Does anybody know? anyone beer. What's
happening? Am I Am I shooting it? Is it
Is this doing anything?
All right. So, what are the alternatives then for folks stuck without their AOL
lifeline to the internet? Cellular broadband is one. If you happen to have
good cell service, but [music] then don't have good land-based internet.
Starlink is relatively high speed and low latency if you can afford it and you
don't mind playing Diablo I with definitely the best player of all time.
And there are also some other satellite-based services that are
starting to come online. But beyond that, the best bet might actually be, as
much as it pains me to say this having just used one of them, alternative
dialup providers, which there are still a couple of like NetZero and DSL
Extreme. By the way, guys, if you also
want to see what it's like having such slow speeds, you can emulate it yourself
using the Chrome development tools that we showed you before. We'll have a link
down below. And we'll also have a link, thank god this is over to our sponsor,
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guys enjoyed this video, why not check out the time that we installed 10 gig
internet at our office. That was way more fun. This was so frustrating and
also [music] like like PTSD like
traumatizing. Like I forgot how crappy everything was.