Although dial up internet does get a lot of
bad press and is considered old and chunky this is just the opinion of those
with access to high speed broadband. There are those who live their entire
lives with nothing but dial up and those who prefer it, and one experiment by
Dan Grabham whereby he spent a full 24 hours relying purely on dial up internet
showed some interesting results of how people adapt to that.
The fact of the matter is that while dial
up is slower than some broadband it is also faster than some, particularly at
peak times as broadband does not experience slowing here, and of course there
are some benefits to using dialup over broadband, such as increased security,
pay as you go systems and easy access without the need to register to a
provider in advance. The speed you get will depend on the dial up provider you
are using just like any other internet connection and of course dial up can be
far more reliable, particularly in rural areas.
It is said that 10% of the British
population still rely completely on dialup, this could be for a number of
reasons, but the most common reasons are that these homes are located in
not-spots (areas where no ISPs are able to provide internet access, such areas
often have patchy or none existent phone coverage / dongle coverage),
not-a-lot-spots (areas where there are
very few ISPs able to offer internet access, this is likely to suffer drop
outs, patchy service and very low speeds), and not-at-all-goof-spots (such
homes exist in areas where there are ISPs able to offer service, but it is
patchy, unreliable and slow), in all such cases users are simply better off
with dialup internet connections.
Of course this doesn’t mean going back to
the dial-up you might have suffered in the 80s, there are much better hardware
options now – they don’t make anywhere near as much noise, they can be
compatible with USB which means you don’t have to have a bulky old laptop or computer
to use dialup, and you can start accessing the internet almost instantly, all
you need is a phone line.
The problem with what people remember about
dialup is that they couldn’t do
anything with it, however that was back when you were a kid and had to wait
until your parents had gone to bed just so that you could use the phone line –
today people hardly even use their home phone lines and there is a lot more to
the internet than their used to be. Not only this but thanks to mobile
technology and 3G many websites offer alternative formats that provide a much
smaller webpage, so even if you’re dialup is a little slower you won’t feel it
too much.
