As evinced by my last post, I’ve been mucking about with dialup lately. I’ve resurrected my TOAST.net account and run a few tests on it. Honestly, with the included accelerator, I could bear using the service if it meant the difference between $50 satellite and $8 dialup (pay by year). I’d have to go into town to do any big downloads, but I’d do that with sat internet anyway. You can’t run VoIP over satellite so the $50-to-$8 comparison stands.
Anyhow, after trying TOAST.net I thought “who are the big players in the dialup industry?” Here’s the list I came up with:
1) AOL
2) NetZero/Juno (the former has more access numbers)
3) EarthLink/PeoplePC
There are other dialup ISPs, but they pretty much are just the same as TOAST.net, albeit with different pricing, possibly a shorter list of access numbers and a different domain on the end of your e-mail address. As such, I’m sticking with TOAST.net, which I’ve had good luck with, for my emergency dialup/every-once-in-a-while newsgroup access/branded e-mail needs. Even Earthlink and NetZero share the 729-1999 number, and thus probably that USAWide backbone network and dialup performance.
However I was curious about AOL. From what I’ve gathered, they’re the only company in my area that actually has a different phone number for dialup access than 830-729-1999. As such, their service would be running on different equipment, with possibly different performance characteristics.
So I ordered a $9.99 limited-support unlimited-access dialup account from “The New AOL”. The company still sells a $25.90 (!?!) package that includes God-knows-what addons and granny-proof support, but I just wanted to know how the connection fared. My new e-mail address is [email protected]; iansltx (my usual screen name), ianlittman and a few other of my first-choice screen names were unavailable, something that has never happened to me anywhere else.
After dropping $9.99 for a month of ‘net access, I proceeded to download AOL 9.0 Optimized (or what the heck ever it’s called) over my broadband connection. The software was obviously designed for being distributed on a CD; the thing must have weighed in at 200MB! Pulling that software in over dialup would’ve taken me nearly fourteen hours, assuming I has a 32 kbps connection and wasn’t doing anything else with said connection. INSANE!
Now AOL does have a version 9.1 in beta that’s about one-third the size (or at least it seemed that way; AOL’s proprietary downloader doesn’t tell you such things) but, compared with an all-inclusive 4.5-megabyte installer for TOAST.net AOL’s installer is patently ridiculous. Alternately, you can find your phone number and connect with Windows’ own dialer for a zero-KB download. Last I heard that doesn’t work with AW…er…AOL.
So once the download and installation process was done (which took nearly as long as installing Windows 7, mind you), I turned off wireless on the computer and dialed into AOL. After a bit, the modem synced with AOL and I was online…ish.
You see, apparently the computers on AOL’s end are downright sucky. I’d wager the AOL number I connected to was running off a fractional T1 with too many users on a phone line that had been chewed on by varmints of multiple types. You wouldn’t know that by the connection latency, which shows off the AOL Transit Data Network (ATDN for short), but the connection was actually more sluggish than satellite. Which reminds me, I need to uninstall the crapware when I’m done with their month of service; I think it’s slowing my computer down.
So here are the traceroutes. As I said above, they look decent. Too bad download speeds are around 19.2k and pages take positively forever to load. In case you’re wondering, I wan’t doing ANYTHING in tha background while the traceroute was being run, though I suspect AOL 9.0 was.
Tracing route to softlayer.com [66.228.118.53] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 769 ms 206 ms 197 ms ipt-ntca04.dial.aol.com [207.200.122.4]
2 203 ms 206 ms 198 ms iptfarmna-ntc-sw0-v3.net.aol.com [207.200.120.30]
3 1495 ms 1586 ms 428 ms wc1-ntc-A0.net.aol.com [172.24.20.11]
4 220 ms 205 ms 206 ms dar1-ntc-s0-1-0.atdn.net [66.185.142.117]
5 2006 ms 1681 ms 205 ms pop1-sjg-p10-0.atdn.net [66.185.152.63]
6 195 ms 196 ms 221 ms so5-1-0-2488M.br1.JC2.gblx.net [64.208.110.93]
7 1926 ms 1753 ms 776 ms te1-1.cer03.dal01.dallas-datacenter.com [64.215.81.2]
8 242 ms 244 ms 245 ms po3.dar02.dal01.dallas-datacenter.com [66.228.118.211]
9 2084 ms 244 ms 245 ms po2.slr01.dal01.softlayer.com [66.228.118.142]
10 242 ms 253 ms 252 ms www.softlayer.com [66.228.118.53]
Tracing route to google.com [74.125.67.100] over a maximum of 30 hops
1 206 ms 196 ms 198 ms ipt-ntca04.dial.aol.com [207.200.122.4]
2 196 ms 190 ms 197 ms iptfarmna-ntc-sw0-v3.net.aol.com [207.200.120.30]
3 186 ms 199 ms 196 ms wc2-ntc-A0.net.aol.com [172.24.20.12]
4 186 ms 197 ms 198 ms dar2-ntc-s0-1-0.atdn.net [66.185.142.165]
5 189 ms 196 ms 197 ms dar1-ntc-s0-2-0.atdn.net [66.185.152.10]
6 187 ms 555 ms 189 ms pop1-sjg-p10-0.atdn.net [66.185.152.53]
7 188 ms 189 ms 198 ms google.atdn.net [66.185.150.94]
8 189 ms 196 ms 197 ms 72.14.239.250
9 259 ms 253 ms 261 ms 209.85.249.140
10 252 ms 269 ms 253 ms 72.14.239.131
11 * 975 ms 269 ms 64.233.174.46
12 276 ms 277 ms 277 ms gw-in-f100.google.com [74.125.67.100]
As you can see, AOL doesn’t appear to peer with any of the “big guys” in Dallas, which I find odd. But hey, you take what you can get, right? Yes, but you have a bit more selection in dialup-land ISP-wise than if you want broadband. Again, while the traceroutes above are decent, I would wholeheartedly recommend you go with a sane dialup provider like TOAST.net, then download the AOL software yourself if you must have their keyword-ridden content stable. You’ll end up with a much more reliable connection from my experience, and you can uninstall their crapware without losing internet access. Plus, it doesn’t cost more and may well cost less than AWOL…erm…AOL. No wonder they’re a dying company who wants to get out of the dialup biz.