Dial-up Internet access
In 1979, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, graduates of Duke University, created an early predecessor to dial-up Internet access called the Usenet.
[10][11][12][13] 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.
[14] 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.
Poor condition of the telephone line, high noise level and other factors all affect dial-up speed.
[15][16] 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.
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.
[22][23] Dial-up has seen a significant fall in usage, with the potential to cease to exist in future as more users switch to broadband.
[24] 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 the Internet is first made.
Factors such as phone line noise as well as the quality of the modem itself play a large part in determining connection speeds.
[29] [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.
Video games released from 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.
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 drawback of this approach is a loss in quality, where the graphics acquire compression artifacts taking on a blurry or colorless appearance.
Other devices, such as satellite receivers and digital video recorders (such as TiVo), have also used a dial-up connection using a household phone socket.
Later, these devices moved to using an Ethernet connection to the user's Internet router, which became a more convenient approach due to the growth in popularity of broadband.
