Dial-up access

Dial-up access is a form of Internet access through which the client uses a modem connected to a computer and a telephone line to dial into an Internet service provider's (ISP) node to establish a modem-to-modem link, which is then routed to the Internet.

Despite being the way people have connected to the internet for many years, it is being steadily replaced by Broadband internet connections, and nowadays DSL subscription plans cost the equivalent of slower dial-up access. Until recently it was the cheapest method of internet access, but is slowly losing that distinction.

Availability

Dial-up requires no additional infrastructure on top of the telephone network. As telephone points are available throughout the world, dial-up remains useful to travellers. Dial-up is usually the only choice available for most rural or remote areas where getting a broadband connection is impossible due to low population and demand. Sometimes dial-up access may also be an alternative to people who have limited budgets, though broadband is now increasingly available across the world.

Dial-up requires time to establish a telephone connection and perform handshaking before data transfers can take place, potentially a source of frustration. In locales with telephone connection charges, each connection incurs an incremental cost. If calls are time-charged, the duration of the connection incurs costs.

Dial-up access is a transient connection, because either the user or the ISP terminates the connection. Internet service providers will often set a limit on connection durations to prevent hogging of access, and will disconnect the user — requiring reconnection and the costs and delays associated with that.

Performance

Modern dial-up modems typically have a maximum theoretical speed of 56 kbit/s (using the V.92 protocol), although in most cases only up to 53 kbit/s is possible due to overhead and FCC regulation. These speeds are currently considered the maximum possible; in many cases transfer speeds will be lower, averaging anywhere between 33-43 kbit/s. Factors such as phone line noise and conditions, as well as the quality of the modem itself, if the modem is external or internal, all play a large part in determining connection speeds.

Dial-up connections usually have high latency that can be as high as 200 ms or even more, which can make online gaming or videoconferencing difficult, if not impossible. Some games, such as Galaxies and The Sims Online are capable of running on 56 K dial-up. Gamers with dial-up connections are often disconnected from game servers due to the "lag", or high latency, of the connection.

Replacement by broadband

Broadband Internet access (via cable and DSL) has been increasingly replacing dial-up access in many parts of the world over the last five years. The reason for this is mostly due to broadband connections featuring speeds which far exceed the capacity of dial-up, many of which provide speeds greater than 1 Mbit/s, as well as reducing prices under dial-up prices offered by companies such as Verizon. An increasing amount of Internet content such as Macromedia Flash, online gaming and streaming media require large amounts of bandwidth.

Many computer games released in 2005 (such as Battlefield 2 or Battlefront) are not compatible for online play with dial-up modems. These first person shooter style games are the most sensitive to lag, making playing them on dial-up impractical.

High-speed dial-up

What is often advertised as "high-speed dial-up Internet" or "accelerated dial-up" by service providers such as Earthlink and NetZero in the United States is a form of dial-up access that utilizes the newer modem standard v.92 to shorten the log-on (or handshake) process, and then once a connection has been established the provider will selectively compress, filter, and cache data being sent to the users home with the overall effect of increasing the speed of browsing most standard web pages (see also proxy server).

The term high speed is misleading as these processes do not increase the overall throughput of the line, only making more efficient use of the bandwidth that is already there. Certain applications cannot be accelerated, such as SHTTP, streaming media, or file transfers. The compression of certain files such as pictures can have a negative effect on the browsing experience of the user, due to the lower quality that it imposes.

External links

Internet access

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Availability

Performance

Replacement by broadband

High-speed dial-up

External links