Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telephone line which could be connected using an RJ-11 connector. Dial-up connections use modems to decode audio signals into data to send to a router or computer, and to encode signals from the latter two devices to send to another modem at the ISP.
50-457: NewsLibrary is an online news database operated by Newsbank that houses a conglomeration of news from over "4,000 outlets in the United States", most of which are "traditional" sources of news coverage, such as "newspapers and television stations". A total of 65 different newspapers are included in the article database. The database itself allows a user to input a search term and then narrow
100-713: A dial-up modem. The V.42, V.42bis and V.44 standards allow modems to accept compressed data at a rate faster than the line rate. These algorithms use data compression to achieve higher throughput. For instance, a 53.3 kbit/s connection with V.44 can transmit up to 53.3 × 6 = 320 kbit/s if the offered data stream can be compressed that much. However, the compression ratio varies considerably. ZIP archives, JPEG images, MP3 , video, etc. are already compressed. A modem might be sending compressed files at approximately 50 kbit/s, uncompressed files at 160 kbit/s, and pure text at 320 kbit/s, or any rate in this range. As telephone-based Internet lost popularity by
150-422: A household phone socket. This connection allowed to download data at request and to report usage (e.g. ordering pay-per-view ) to the service provider. This feature did not require an Internet service provider account – instead, the device's internal modem dialed the server of the service provider directly. These devices may experience difficulties when operating on a VoIP line because the compression could alter
200-423: A problem with the circuit as being on line , as opposed to the power source or end-point equipment. Since at least 1950, in computing , the terms on-line and off-line have been used to refer to whether machines, including computers and peripheral devices , are connected or not. Here is an excerpt from the 1950 book High-Speed Computing Devices : One example of a common use of these concepts with email
250-445: A purely online sexual relationship. He also conjectures that an online/offline distinction may be seen by people as "rather quaint and not quite comprehensible" within 10 years. This distinction between online and offline is sometimes inverted, with online concepts being used to define and to explain offline activities, rather than (as per the conventions of the desktop metaphor with its desktops, trash cans, folders, and so forth)
300-549: A receiving modem. This receiving modem would demodulate the signal from analogue noise, back into digital data for the computer to process. The simplicity of this arrangement meant that people would be unable to use their phone line for verbal communication until the Internet call was finished. The Internet speed using this technology can drop to 21.6 kbit/s or less. Poor condition of the telephone line, high noise level and other factors all affect dial-up speed. For this reason, it
350-514: A second phone line. However, many rural areas remain without high-speed Internet, despite the eagerness of potential customers. This can be attributed to population, location, or sometimes ISPs' lack of interest due to little chance of profitability and high costs to build the required infrastructure. Some dial-up ISPs have responded to the increased competition by lowering their rates and making dial-up an attractive option for those who merely want email access or basic Web browsing. Dial-up has seen
400-452: A server), but the user may not wish for Outlook to trigger that call whenever it is configured to check for mail. Another example of the use of these concepts is digital audio technology. A tape recorder , digital audio editor , or other device that is online is one whose clock is under the control of the clock of a synchronization master device. When the sync master commences playback, the online device automatically synchronizes itself to
450-414: A significant fall in usage, with the potential to cease to exist in future as more users switch to broadband. In 2013, only about 3% of the U.S population used dial-up, compared to 30% in 2000. One contributing factor is the bandwidth requirements of newer computer programs, like operating systems and antivirus software, which automatically download sizeable updates in the background when a connection to
500-455: Is a mail user agent (MUA) that can be instructed to be in either online or offline states. One such MUA is Microsoft Outlook . When online it will attempt to connect to mail servers (to check for new mail at regular intervals, for example), and when offline it will not attempt to make any such connection. The online or offline state of the MUA does not necessarily reflect the connection status between
550-436: Is also given by the prefixes " cyber " and "e", as in words " cyberspace ", " cybercrime ", " email ", and " e-commerce ". In contrast, "offline" can refer to either computing activities performed while disconnected from the Internet, or alternatives to Internet activities (such as shopping in brick-and-mortar stores). The term "offline" is sometimes used interchangeably with the acronym "IRL", meaning "in real life". During
SECTION 10
#1732851615242600-449: Is connected to a larger system. Being online means that the equipment or subsystem is connected, or that it is ready for use. "Online" has come to describe activities performed on and data available on the Internet , for example: " online identity ", " online predator ", " online gambling ", " online game ", " online shopping ", " online banking ", and " online learning ". A Similar meaning
650-419: Is described as a successor to the web archive VU/TEXT that was owned by Knight Ridder and shut down in 1996. NewsLibrary was purchased by Newsbank in 2001. NewsLibrary differs from other news databases in that the site allows the user to input a date, region, and newspaper, but nothing in the search bar; this brings up all of the articles published within the narrowed selection string, rather than searching for
700-575: Is popularly called the 21600 Syndrome. Dial-up connections to the Internet require no additional infrastructure other than the telephone network and the modems and servers needed to make and answer the calls. Because telephone access is widely available, dial-up is often the only choice available for rural or remote areas, where broadband installations are not prevalent due to low population density and high infrastructure cost. A 2008 Pew Research Center study stated that only 10% of US adults still used dial-up Internet access. The study found that
750-434: Is reality (i.e., real life or "meatspace" ). Slater states that this distinction is "obviously far too simple". To support his argument that the distinctions in relationships are more complex than a simple dichotomy of online versus offline, he observes that some people draw no distinction between an online relationship, such as indulging in cybersex , and an offline relationship, such as being pen pals . He argues that even
800-439: Is termed as offline. In the context of file systems, "online" and "offline" are synonymous with "mounted" and "not mounted". For example, in file systems' resizing capabilities , "online grow" and "online shrink" respectively mean the ability to increase or decrease the space allocated to that file system without needing to unmount it. Online and offline distinctions have been generalised from computing and telecommunication into
850-416: Is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network ; what you're hearing is how a network designed to send the noises made by your muscles as they pushed around air came to transmit anything [that can be] coded in zeroes and ones. -Alexis Madrigal, paraphrasing Glenn Fleishman Analog telephone lines are digitally switched and transported inside a Digital Signal 0 once reaching
900-509: The Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 , supported dial-up as well as broadband. The GameCube could use dial-up and broadband connections, but this was used in very few games and required a separate adapter. The original Xbox exclusively required a broadband connection. Many computer and video games released since 2006 do not even include the option to use dial-up. However, there are exceptions to this, such as Vendetta Online , which can still run on
950-468: The Internet Archive announced an offline server project intended to provide access to material on inexpensive servers that can be updated using USB sticks and SD cards. Likewise, offline storage is computer data storage that has no connection to the other systems until a connection is deliberately made. Additionally, an otherwise online system that is powered down may be considered offline. With
1000-531: The University of Kent offered dial-up UUCP to non-academic users in the late 1980s. Commercial dial-up Internet access was first offered in 1992 by Sprint in the United States and by Pipex in the United Kingdom. After the introduction of commercial broadband in the late 1990s, dial-up became less popular. In the United States, the availability of dial-up Internet access dropped from 40% of Americans in
1050-514: The Usenet . The Usenet was a UNIX based system that used a dial-up connection to transfer data through telephone modems. Dial-up Internet access has existed since the 1980s via public providers such as NSFNET -linked universities in the United States. In the United Kingdom, JANET linked academic users, including a connection to the ARPANET via University College London , while Brunel University and
SECTION 20
#17328516152421100-472: The dot-com bubble with the likes of ISPs such as Sprint , EarthLink , MSN Dial-up , NetZero , Prodigy , and America Online (more commonly known as AOL ). This was in large part because broadband Internet did not become widely used until well into the 2000s. Since then, most dial-up access has been replaced by broadband . In 1979, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis , graduates of Duke University , created an early predecessor to dial-up Internet access called
1150-503: The telephone can be regarded as an online experience in some circumstances, and that the blurring of the distinctions between the uses of various technologies (such as PDA versus mobile phone, internet television versus internet, and telephone versus Voice over Internet Protocol ) has made it "impossible to use the term online meaningfully in the sense that was employed by the first generation of Internet research". Slater asserts that there are legal and regulatory pressures to reduce
1200-403: The 19th century, the term on line was commonly used in both the railroad and telegraph industries. For railroads, a signal box would send messages down the line (track), via a telegraph line (cable), indicating the track's status: Train on line or Line clear . Telegraph linemen would refer to sending current through a line as direct on line or battery on line ; or they may refer to
1250-442: The Internet is first made. These background downloads can take several minutes or longer and, until all updates are completed, they can severely impact the amount of bandwidth available to other applications like Web browsers. Since an "always on" broadband is the norm expected by most newer applications being developed, this automatic background downloading trend is expected to continue to eat away at dial-up's available bandwidth to
1300-548: The UK. BT turned off its dial-up service in 2013. In 2012, it was estimated that 7% of Internet connections in New Zealand were dial-up. One NZ (formerly Vodafone) turned off its dial-up service in 2021. Modern dial-up modems typically have a maximum theoretical transfer speed of 56 kbit/s (using the V.90 or V.92 protocol ), although in most cases, 40–50 kbit/s is the norm. Factors such as phone line noise as well as
1350-418: The buffering used by a reverse proxy to bridge the different data rates. Despite the rapid decline, dial-up Internet still exists in some rural areas, and many areas of developing and underdeveloped nations, although wireless and satellite broadband are providing faster connections in many rural areas where fibre or copper may be uneconomical. In 2010, it was estimated that there were 800,000 dial-up users in
1400-409: The computer on which it is running and the Internet i.e. the computer itself may be online—connected to the Internet via a cable modem or other means—while Outlook is kept offline by the user, so that it makes no attempt to send or to receive messages. Similarly, a computer may be configured to employ a dial-up connection on demand (as when an application such as Outlook attempts to make a connection to
1450-435: The detriment of dial-up users' applications. Many newer websites also now assume broadband speeds as the norm, and when connected to with slower dial-up speeds may drop (timeout) these slower connections to free up communication resources. On websites that are designed to be more dial-up friendly, use of a reverse proxy prevents dial-ups from being dropped as often but can introduce long wait periods for dial-up users caused by
1500-581: The distinction between online and offline, with a "general tendency to assimilate online to offline and erase the distinction," stressing, however, that this does not mean that online relationships are being reduced to pre-existing offline relationships. He conjectures that greater legal status may be assigned to online relationships (pointing out that contractual relationships, such as business transactions, online are already seen as just as "real" as their offline counterparts), although he states it to be hard to imagine courts awarding palimony to people who have had
1550-430: The early 2000s to 3% in the early 2010s. It is still used where other forms are not available or where the cost is too high, as in some rural or remote areas. Because there was no technology to allow different carrier signals on a telephone line at the time, dial-up Internet access relied on using audio communication. A modem would take the digital data from a computer, modulate it into an audio signal and send it to
NewsLibrary - Misplaced Pages Continue
1600-435: The field of human interpersonal relationships. The distinction between what is considered online and what is considered offline has become a subject of study in the field of sociology . The distinction between online and offline is conventionally seen as the distinction between computer-mediated communication and face-to-face communication (e.g., face time ), respectively. Online is virtuality or cyberspace , and offline
1650-420: The growing communication tools and media, the words offline and online are used very frequently. If a person is active over a messaging tool and is able to accept the messages it is termed as online message and if the person is not available and the message is left to view when the person is back, it is termed as offline message. In the same context, the person's availability is termed as online and non-availability
1700-622: The level of direct and indirect links, the maximum amount of local disc space allowed to be consumed, and the schedule on which local copies are checked to see whether they are up-to-date, are configurable for each individual Favourites entry. For communities that lack adequate Internet connectivity—such as developing countries, rural areas, and prisons—offline information stores such as WiderNet's eGranary Digital Library (a collection of approximately thirty million educational resources from more than two thousand web sites and hundreds of CD-ROMs) provide offline access to information. More recently,
1750-442: The listed search by date, region and newspaper, with the earliest possible articles to find being from the early 1980s. The site charges a fee for viewing the content, which is done on a pay-per-article scale, with each article costing $ 1.95. The cost of viewing articles is charged to the user accounts on a monthly basis, though there is the option to purchase 100 articles directly for $ 77. Originally developed by Knight Ridder , It
1800-507: The local copies are up-to-date at regular intervals or by checking that the local copies are up-to-date whenever the browser is switched to the online. One such web browser is Internet Explorer . When pages are added to the Favourites list, they can be marked to be "available for offline browsing". Internet Explorer will download local copies of both the marked page and, optionally, all of the pages that it links to. In Internet Explorer version 6,
1850-405: The master and commences playing from the same point in the recording. A device that is offline uses no external clock reference and relies upon its own internal clock. When many devices are connected to a sync master it is often convenient, if one wants to hear just the output of one single device, to take it offline because, if the device is played back online, all synchronized devices have to locate
1900-482: The mid-1990s to the mid-2000s that utilized Internet access such as EverQuest , Red Faction , Warcraft 3 , Final Fantasy XI , Phantasy Star Online , Guild Wars , Unreal Tournament , Halo: Combat Evolved , Audition , Quake 3: Arena , Starsiege: Tribes and Ragnarok Online , etc., accommodated for 56k dial-up with limited data transfer between the game servers and user's personal computer. The first consoles to provide Internet connectivity,
1950-456: The mid-2000s, some Internet service providers such as TurboUSA, Netscape , CdotFree, and NetZero started using data compression to increase the perceived speed. As an example, EarthLink advertises "surf the Web up to 7x faster" using a compression program on images, text/html, and SWF flash animations prior to transmission across the phone line. The pre-compression operates much more efficiently than
2000-602: The most common reason for retaining dial-up access was high broadband prices. Users cited lack of infrastructure as a reason less often than stating that they would never upgrade to broadband. That number had fallen to 6% by 2010, and to 3% by 2013. A survey conducted in 2018 estimated that 0.3% of Americans were using dial-up by 2017. The CRTC estimated that there were 336,000 Canadian dial-up users in 2010. Broadband Internet access via cable , digital subscriber line , wireless broadband , mobile broadband , satellite and FTTx has replaced dial-up access in many parts of
2050-427: The on-the-fly compression of V.44 modems. Typically, website text is compacted to 5%, thus increasing effective throughput to approximately 1000 kbit/s, and JPEG/GIF/PNG images are lossy-compressed to 15–20%, increasing effective throughput up to 300 kbit/s. The drawback of this approach is a loss in quality, where the graphics acquire compression artifacts taking on a blurry or colorless appearance. However,
NewsLibrary - Misplaced Pages Continue
2100-417: The online state. This can be useful when the computer is offline and connection to the Internet is impossible or undesirable. The pages are downloaded either implicitly into the web browser's own cache as a result of prior online browsing by the user or explicitly by a browser configured to keep local copies of certain web pages, which are updated when the browser is in the online state, either by checking that
2150-519: The other way around. Several cartoons appearing in The New Yorker have satirized this. One includes Saint Peter asking for a username and a password before admitting a man into Heaven. Another illustrates "the offline store" where "All items are actual size!", shoppers may "Take it home as soon as you pay for it!", and "Merchandise may be handled prior to purchase!" Dial-up Internet access Dial-up Internet reached its peak popularity during
2200-578: The playback point and wait for each other device to be in synchronization. (For related discussion, see MIDI timecode , Word clock , and recording system synchronization.) A third example of a common use of these concepts is a web browser that can be instructed to be in either online or offline states. The browser attempts to fetch pages from servers while only in the online state. In the offline state, or "offline mode", users can perform offline browsing , where pages can be browsed using local copies of those pages that have previously been downloaded while in
2250-515: The quality of the modem itself play a large part in determining connection speeds. Some connections may be as low as 20 kbit/s in extremely noisy environments, such as in a hotel room where the phone line is shared with many extensions, or in a rural area, many kilometres from the phone exchange. Other factors such as long loops, loading coils , pair gain , electric fences (usually in rural locations), and digital loop carriers can also slow connections to 20 kbit/s or lower. Note that
2300-636: The telephone company's equipment. Digital Signal 0 is 64 kbit/s and reserves 8 kbit/s for signaling information; therefore a 56 kbit/s connection is the highest that will ever be possible with analog phone lines. Dial-up connections usually have latency as high as 150 ms or even more, higher than many forms of broadband, such as cable or DSL, but typically less than satellite connections. Longer latency can make video conferencing and online gaming difficult, if not impossible. An increasing amount of Internet content such as streaming media will not work at dial-up speeds. Video games released from
2350-446: The transfer speed is dramatically improved. If desired, the user may choose to view uncompressed images instead, but at a much slower load rate. Since streaming music and video are already compressed at the source, they are typically passed by the ISP unaltered. Other devices, such as satellite receivers and digital video recorders (such as TiVo ), have also used a dial-up connection using
2400-400: The use of a term or phrase within an article. Online In computer technology and telecommunications , online indicates a state of connectivity, and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection , but (especially when expressed as "on line" or "on the line") could refer to any piece of equipment or functional unit that
2450-543: The values given are maximum values, and actual values may be slower under certain conditions (for example, noisy phone lines). [The dial-up sounds are] a choreographed sequence that allowed these digital devices to piggyback on an analog telephone network. A phone line carries only the small range of frequencies in which most human conversation takes place: about three hundred to three thousand hertz. The modem works within these [telephone network] limits in creating sound waves to carry data across phone lines. What you're hearing
2500-447: The world. Broadband connections typically offer speeds of 700 kbit/s or higher for two-thirds more than the price of dial-up on average. In addition, broadband connections are always on, thus avoiding the need to connect and disconnect at the start and end of each session. Broadband does not require the exclusive use of a phone line, and thus one can access the Internet and at the same time make and receive voice phone calls without having
#241758