Comment on AOL to discontinue dial-up internet service after 34 years

shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Funny thing is dialup has been non viable for ~15 years if not more where I live. When you can get 100 mbit fibre for like $5 a month and it costs a whopping $12.5 dollars a month for a 1000 mbit fibre line, it makes no economic sense to offer dialup.

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  • black_flag@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Where the fuck do you get fiber for $12/month?? Not in the US I assume.

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    • Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Of course not.

      I remember when I first moved to the US and saw the broadband and cell phone prices. Corruption american style.

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      • BurntWits@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Don’t visit Canada then. American prices look dirt cheap compared to what we have here.

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    • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah, probably not. If your country is the size of a postage stamp, it doesn’t take a whole lot of capital investment to run fiber through the entire thing. Whereas if your country is the size of the United States, it takes a fuck ton of capital investment to cover even a decent portion of it by laying lines like that.

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      • Anarch157a@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        My country is as big as the US and we can get 500 Mbs fibre for $23, less than half what AT&T charges.

        Is not the size of the country that make fibre costs to be so high in US, it’s unchecked, exploitative capitalism allowed by a corrupt plutocratic government.

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      • scott@lemmy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Bullshit excuses. They were given bank ass roll to build that shit out proper and just pocketed it.

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      • Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Less to do with absolute size and more to do with urban density and population concentration.

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    • Psythik@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No shit. I pay $60/mo for gigabit, and I thought that was a good deal…

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    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No American would spell fiber that way.

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  • roofuskit@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The are large portions on the US where there’s dialup or satellite only.

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• atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I read like 10 years ago that a small but still double digit percentage of their income still came from dial-up subscribers many of whom didn’t still use the service. It was speculated at the time that many of these people simply didn’t realize they were still paying for it. I’m guessing they all finally died or credit card numbers changed enough that it wasn’t free money for them anymore.

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• givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Every rural house gets a phone line, just like they all get roads and mail

  It’s not profitable, but that didn’t matter because it was a utility

  With Broadband, it’s a “luxury” so to get it out to a clump of rural users, they all need to pay for it, or wait and hope someone else pays to get it closer.

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  • BD89@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The government gave them $400 Billion dollars to do it and they pocketed the money.

    huffpost.com/…/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_583939…

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    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Biden just did it in 2024 again, I think that was “just” 5 billion tho

      Pretty sure there was more than just those two

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  • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Not anymore. Now the cell phone company just puts up a tower and runs one fiber line to it and everybody has high speed internet or a rich billionaire launches some satellites into space on his rockets.

    Laying one fiber line to a cell phone tower is much cheaper than laying a bunch of fiber lines to each individual household.

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    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      We may have different standards for “rural areas”…

      I did Google for starlink because I’m not up to date on their coverage, and there’s still a lot of dead ones up north.

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      • shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        That is possible. I was basing my comment on some information from an FCC report that said that there was no place in the continental United States that was not able to be covered by Starlink.

        There was this program called Bead that was going to prioritize places with no internet access whatsoever or dial up for the first people to get funding, and they say they found that there wasn’t any, so they had to go for the next thing which was slow internet.

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• moseschrute@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That’s like Netflix discontinuing their dvd service only a few years ago

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