A History of Dial Up Internet
Technology moves at such a fast pace in today’s climate that it is possible for things to get left behind, could this be the case for dial up internet? At one time dial up was the only way you could access the internet and still has some benefits today.
Due to the fact that user requirements were very simple when the internet was just starting out there wasn’t much call for super fast connection speeds. As users started to demand more and more from the internet such as multimedia rich content the need for better connections came about. Due the bottlenecks that come with dial up internet it is hard to access music and videos which is something that does not present a problem when using broadband internet.
Before DSL and Cable become common in most households the only way to access the Internet was using dial up and that technology went through a major overhaul. It started off with the 9800 baud modem and then progressed to the 28.8kb/s technology and at its limit achieved 56kb/s.
The main selling point for dial up was the ease of access for most customers. Through an existing telephone infrastructure a person could connect to the internet using copper wires which was a remote connection.
The challenge with that technology is the large amount of electromagnetic interference that these copper wires had. If you lived in a rural area then you were likely to encounter connection problems which created discourse amongst many people.
DSL and cable services came about after a government intervention. These technologies worked by using the current infrastructure but utilised higher frequencies in order to provide a faster more reliable service.
While the proliferation of this new broadband technology has grown rapidly there are still certain individuals that rely on dial up internet. There are number of things one can do to make their dial up internet faster and more reliable. Try to minimise the amount of tabs you keep open in your browser. Each tab that you open uses a certain amount of bandwidth. It is also a good idea to make sure the line you use for your internet is not shared with a telephone line. Features such as call waiting may cause interference will make your dial up internet run a lot slower.