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A comment on The sound of the dialup, pictured and explained (2012).

Re:The sound of the dialup, pictured and explained (2012) by bbcbasic on Monday March 09, 2015 @05:06PM (#9174058)
Amazing I remember the "tune" that the modem makes from back in the day but never realized how much stuff was going on. I never knew a custom connection was being made each time, but I guess that makes sense as not all phone connections are equal. Has anyone tried to use a dial up model recently? Do the telephone lines still support it, or has anything changed on the exchanges that would stop a modem working?
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Re:The sound of the dialup, pictured and explained (2012) by edlinfan on Monday March 09, 2015 @05:20PM (#9174172)
Many credit-card POS terminals still use dial-up. Ever wonder why they take so long to authenticate?

Moreover, about 3% of Americans still use dial-up as their primary Internet connection.[1]

[1] - http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/3-of-america...

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Re:The sound of the dialup, pictured and explained (2012) by csixty4 on Monday March 09, 2015 @07:06PM (#9174716)
ATMs as well.
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Re:The sound of the dialup, pictured and explained (2012) by hahnfeld on Monday March 09, 2015 @07:27PM (#9174833)
Apparently still alive and well in some circles (agree with below that most uses are financial/credit/legacy apps). I worked at one of the largest developers of ISP modem infrastructure in the late 90's called Ascend. Company was purchased by Lucent. Just a few years ago I ran into a friend still with the company and mentioned that, globally, carriers were still installing new dial-up infrastructure to the tune of a few $100-million annually. Amazing.
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Re:The sound of the dialup, pictured and explained (2012) by JonnieCache on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @06:43AM (#9176995)
That kind of handshaking goes on all the time. Pretty much the same thing happens when you plug in a USB device, it's just less analog.
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Re:The sound of the dialup, pictured and explained (2012) by voltagex_ on Monday March 09, 2015 @08:12PM (#9175032)
A lot of lines here in Australia will still support it (some at only ~31.2kbit due to copper quality) but when you sign up to ADSL you can order a "naked" service with no dialtone, which can be cheaper in some cases - there'll be no dialup fallback if you do that, though.
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