How Bad is Dialup Internet in 2025?

Quick Overview

Dial-up internet in 2025 is painfully slow, often clocking in under 60 Kbps, making modern web browsing virtually impossible, as demonstrated by the 17-minute load time for a single YouTube video and the failure of a simple Wikipedia request, although download managers and disabling images offer minor relief.

Key Points: The primary test showed downloading a 17-minute YouTube video took over 17 minutes, indicating speeds around 56 Kbps (53 down/48 up kbps with 1.5% packet loss in Chrome DevTools throttling). Attempting to load the Wikipedia main page resulted in a timeout error (ERRCONNECTIONTIMEDOUT), illustrating the difficulty of accessing even basic text-heavy modern websites. The 56K modem speed (53/48 kbps) used in the test is 50 times slower than the minimum 3 Mbps recommended by Netflix for basic HD streaming. The presenter found that even older, text-based games like Ultima Online (designed for 200kbps latency) took 41 seconds just to enter the universe when throttled to 56K speeds. The video highlights that 163,401 US households still used dial-up as of the 2023 census data, suggesting a small but existing user base. The presenter successfully loaded the LTT store and Wikipedia page only after disabling image loading in Chrome settings, confirming that modern, image-heavy sites are unusable on dial-up. The video concludes by suggesting that companies like DeleteMe, which help remove personal data, might be the only viable online activity for those stuck on such slow connections.

Context: The video explores the current usability of 56k dial-up internet in a hypothetical 2025 scenario, using modern web services and games to demonstrate performance limitations. The host, Jordan Block (guest host in this segment), sets up a StarTech 56K USB Dial-up and Fax Modem and uses Chrome's Developer Tools to throttle a modern connection down to 56K speeds, comparing the experience to the late 1990s/early 2000s internet era. The video also features Linus Sebastian (in an inset window) and a sponsor segment for DeleteMe, a data removal service.