Awesome Tips How Bad is Dialup Internet in 2025?
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Pull out your Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls CDs—we’re taking a trip back to the late ’90s to revisit the experience of dial-up internet. With AOL recently shutting down its iconic dial-up service, we felt it was the perfect time to test Linus’s patience with dial-up speeds in 2025.
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CHAPTERS
—————————————————
0:00 Intro
2:06 James’s House
3:54 Linus Searches Linus
5:43 Dialup Tech Tips
7:41 SpeedTest…SlowTest
9:00 Steaming on Streaming
12:12 Gaming
14:20 Alternatives
16:37 Credits
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my internet is 500kb/s
Watching this from 2G EDGE at 190 kbps,I can pretty much say that its similar to dial up internet.
The Cruisin' USA reference really took me back. All those days I spent at the go cart track warming up on the arcade machine with the Cruisin't USA logo burnt into the CRT monitor because it's always there unless you're playing. Ah, good times.
I work as an IT technician in an airport and all the POS machines in our company still use dial up connection.
I’m genuinely surprised I never experienced dial-up, the way my family stayed broke. I guess broadband was cheap enough by that point that it was a no-brainer, idk.
I grew up with a 56K Modem gaming on Microsoft Gaming Zone and my favourite game was Midtown Madness 2 and it was absolutely playable for years on a 56k modem. I remember being so envious of the ‘elite’ players on T1 connections at the time. Simpler times and honestly no less fun had, arguably more than today.
Did Linus just say Download managers are also..,it turns out, still a thing? Download managers are still very useful software, I use IDM, Jdownloader and shell tools like aria2c on a daily basis!
I had 54KB download speeds until 2012 here in rural germany,
I remember my first steam game (Company of Heroes) downloading for like 3 days straight
hasina mentioned
I remember a time when we were on dial up and a new age of high speed internet transcended on us… A 2mbps modem…. I was stunned at the sound of that speed… LOL
For me, dialup represents a time when the internet was a fascinating new world of possibilities. It was such a fun new experience going online late at night when the rates were cheaper, to have endless multiplayer Duke Nukem 3D and Command and Conquer 2 sessions with friends. I miss those days.
Any zmodem games while downloading?
The number of sites with trackers and adds and other non content ** before it loads is crazy, in cases more data than you could download in a hour on 56k
"vaaashtlyy" come on Linus !
You're a freaking multi Millionaire.
Get yourself some new teeth.
You are a full grown multi Millionaire man with braces….
My first reaction: "He HAS to try Fandom wiki of some game, without any blockers" …you'd be downloading the opening page for 10 minutes, with how much crap they have on their pages, and the moment you try to scroll down, some extra ad would pop up and load for minutes, while also pushing the entire page's content down so you can't even see it (and also moving it back up after the ad is gone so it's once again out of screen). It's an unusable site without some SERIOUS ad and script blocking. PERSONAL OPINION WARNING: They're probably botting their own ads to generate revenue. No sane real person browses the site without several Internet rubbers on at the same time.
my slow 10Gbit Internet only downloads games in steam with like 250Mbyte/s 🥺😭
My mom making a phone call while my character was in the wilderness on RuneScape and getting me killed is a core memory.
bro was saying "tips to dial-up users" like they can even watch this 😭
He made this video in 2020 but it took this long to upload!
Waiting for Linus to make a video on the RAM price spike and AI data centres 🤐
Why does Linus wear braces in this Video? He has perfect Teeth.
You know… back then we believed once internet becomes so fast, the slowest internet will become free to allow people to atleast browese things… even that is not a thing because, well, money, save every cent -.-
Dial up connection through PSTN is still the best internet connection if You wants to stay focus on what information we want to get from the Internet.
Also I dont know why I was expecting any different. But was kinda hoping a 56k connection would have idk, just shown Myspace?
Im so tired of the internet.
lets go my one random no one else knows of game gets mentioned XD
You really need to review Starlink…
Bro! I'm using VPN from Iran and watching you at 360p and 500kbps rn! tell me about it!
Having braces at age 54 is really embarrassing Linus
Used to do support for AOL Dial-up up until 2015. Could not understand how in 2015 USA, the most powerful, richest country in the world, tons of people were still using dial-up while in Romania, my home country evey man and his dog basically had gigabit fiber.
Correction about download managers and resumeable downloads: they will be resumeable only if the server from which you are downloading support it. In short, it means that server (or rather the endpoint you are communicating with) should be able to both consume and provide certain HTTP headers, and process the consumed headers appropriately as well. While for websites on custom engines and for websites from large vendors it's probably not an issue, some smaller website can still not have resumeable downloads.
Forget 56k. In early Youtube days we had a 1000 Internet connection. Even there i would startup and pause several Youtube videos to watch half a day later.
Friday after school. Preloading what you wanted to watch in the evening. Before going to bed preload for saturday morning.
And for downloads i would start as many as possible. Sometimes 30+.
Each would have an abysmal speed but atleast they were running without needing extra inputs.
You should be aware that dsl connection are also dialup connections .And those dsl dialup connection can go both over normal phone wires or on the same coaxial cable from your favorite tv cable.So...which dialup connection was considered ? The dsl dialup was between 1mbit(phone wires and dsl modem ) and as high as 1gbit (well, only on download, don`t count the upload, and this is over coaxial cable).
In the early 90s sending an email to someone in another country was amazing! I couldn't believe I was communicating with someone overseas! I used a BBS at the time.
Nostalgic has hell, I wouldn't want to ever go back to it though.
And this, boys and girls, is why browser tabs were invented. Because people were opening up multiple browser windows so they could load in the background while we were reading the main one. Tabs made this a lot more efficient and more manageable. You could go to a news page, open the links you wanted in new tabs, and they'd load in the background while you were reading the first article you wanted.
EverQuest and UO and email. That do be about it. Also my website.
Dial up was pretty good from my memory. Most websites were very light. Excess data just was not a thing. Everything was optimised. Download managers were essential.
I used to make websites and your image sizes were in the double digit kb range as an absolute maximum. We used to use real player and it would stream 28kbps audio with ease. 56k is only an issue with bloated data and very inefficient sites if today. Much like games that used to use tricks and hacks to work on tiny storage with limits. We have lost a lot of that requirement for efficiency.
I got isdn then 512k cable very early on, my parents and myself never really suffered from the slowness at the time.
Oh I still use jdownloader 2 and I recommend it to anyone with any internet speed. Usually, I am able to get 2x faster download speeds as it chunks data to parts. It also can get direct links on sketchy download websites full with ads. And best thing about it if multidownloading – works perfect unlike in browsers. Oh it also can extract your downloaded data automatically after it was downloaded.