Dial-Up Internet Simulator

Press Dial up to hear the famous modem screech, then watch a 1997 homepage load at real dial-up speed, one strip of picture at a time. Turn your sound on.

Dial-Up Connection_ □ ×
Not connected.
Dial up to start.

The sound is recreated by your browser from tones and noise, so there's no recording to download. Want it again? Just press Dial up.

What the dial-up noises actually meant

A dial-up modem turned computer data into sound so it could travel over an ordinary phone line. The screech you remember was two modems meeting for the first time and working out how to talk.

  1. Dial tone and beeps: the modem picked up the line and dialled the internet provider's number with touch tones.
  2. The high steady tone: the answering modem's 2100 Hz tone. Its little clicks told phone-network echo cancellers to switch off so they wouldn't spoil the data.
  3. Warbles and "bongs": the two modems announced which standards and speeds they supported.
  4. The screech and hiss: line testing. The modems sent sounds across the whole frequency range to measure how much noise and distortion the line had, then picked the fastest speed it could handle.
  5. Silence: the speaker switched off once the connection was set up. The noisy data carried on, you just couldn't hear it.

How slow was 56k?

A "56k" modem promised 56 kilobits a second, but real downloads usually ran at about 4 to 5 kilobytes a second. Here's how long things would take at that speed:

DownloadSizeTime on dial-up
This page's textabout 20 KB4 seconds
A phone photo3 MBabout 10 minutes
An MP3 song4 MBabout 14 minutes
An HD film1.5 GBabout 3.5 days
A modern video game50 GBabout 4 months

And while you were online, nobody in the house could use the phone: picking up the handset could cut you off.

More nostalgia: text like it's 2005 in the T9 challenge, or play the prank soundboard.

FAQ

Why did dial-up internet make that noise?

The modems were talking to each other in sound, testing the phone line and agreeing on the fastest speed it could carry. The speaker was left on during this handshake so you could hear that the connection was working.

How fast was dial-up internet?

The best modems were rated at 56 kbps, but real downloads were usually about 4 to 5 kilobytes a second, hundreds or thousands of times slower than typical broadband today.

Is dial-up internet still used?

Very rarely, mostly in remote places without other options. Most providers have closed their dial-up services.

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