Who Is Using Dial Up?

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. 

This alongside benefits like security, cost effectiveness, ease of use and so on an so forth make it a popular choice for those who don’t have access to an alternative but it also makes a good alternative for those who simply don’t like broadband all that much.