Dial-up access: Encyclopedia II - Dial-up access - Availability

Dial-up access - Availability

Dial-up requires no additional infrastructure on top of the telephone network. As telephone points are available throughout the world, dial-up remains useful to travellers. Dial-up is usually the only choice available for most rural or remote areas where getting a broadband connection is impossible due to low population and demand, but services like Direcway, internet accessable by satellite, make this reason obsolete. Sometimes, dial-up access may also be an alternative to people who have limited budgets, though broadband is now increasingly available at lower prices due to market competition.

Dial-up requires time to establish a telephone connection and perform handshaking before data transfers can take place, potentially a source of frustration. In locales with telephone connection charges, each connection incurs an incremental cost. If calls are time-charged, the duration of the connection incurs costs.

Dial-up access is a transient connection, because either the user or the ISP terminates the connection. Internet service providers will often set a limit on connection durations to prevent hogging of access, and will disconnect the user — requiring reconnection and the costs and delays associated with that.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Availability", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki