I'd be curious if anyone has actually used a setup like this as a fallback for when their fiber goes down. The latency would be brutal, but a few kbps beats no bps

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elevation 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I pulled out a WRT54G the other day and set it to a 56K limit. A netbook running ubuntu(ish) took several days to complete an apt-get update. But when I connected my laptop with 50 browser tabs, the tabs themselves consumed 100% of the bandwidth with background traffic (despite my ad blocker) and no other network services worked at all.

Unless you've tuned your system for it, dial-up modem speeds are functionally equivalent to "no connection at all".

	▲	geerlingguy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Timeouts are killer too... many modern apps assume slow or no response for more than 10 or 20 seconds is "Internet is down" and will stop trying. It's brutal, even with modern Internet, when people develop apps with the assumption of the Internet connection always having decent latency and bandwidth.

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dave78 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Jeff mentioned in his video that just loading the front page of CNN would take something like an hour and a half (20+ MB).

33.6Kbps is not practical for much on the modern Internet in 2026. As mentioned in a sibling comment, Starlink (even in standby mode) would be much better. lite.cnn.com would load in about 10 seconds which is pretty good, but there's not much else like it left anymore.

What's amazing is how great the Internet in the 1990s managed to be despite these limitations. Just like with RAM and disk space, developers back then had to be very mindful of bandwidth - today's devs (and agents) have the luxury of paying much less attention to that.

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j45 an hour ago | parent [-]

There are services which will remove all but the text when browsing and make it greatly lighter.

20+ mb is the weight of all the javascript javascripting, ultimately to arrange and display an html page.

	▲	ssl-3 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		20+ mb is also the weight of rendering the HTML inside each client, instead of at the server. It is the weight of continuous disdain for users, and of 30 years of not giving a fuck about adding yet another abstraction layer and making it someone else's problem.

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thesuitonym an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The way this is set up is using your normal fiber internet as the backbone, so if the fiber goes down, the dialup does, too.

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connicpu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It would be funny as a project but there's better low speed backup options like a starlink dish on standby mode (500kbps)