• user134450@feddit.orgEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    Can we set up dial-up servers for this occasion, like during the arab spring protests? Assuming there are still classical modems in Belarus.
    It is low tech, but it is quite hard to block without blocking all telephone connections as well.

    • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Modern web won’t work too well over dial-up, bandwidth requirements have gone way up. Even with pretty good lines you’ll only get around 50kbps and loading the front page on my lemmy instance pulls almost 10MB of data. So that alone would take over 20 minutes. Our local news site pulls over 25MB and I assume any commercial site with ads would take even more.

      Obvously you can still run things like usenet, which helps with bandwidth requirements, have local wifi-mesh with proxies and so on, but a single telephone line is still practically nothing. Even 100 dial-up lines with perfectly managed proxies could only support a handful of users of any kind, even when restricting access heavily.

      Wide mesh wifi networks with 4G/5G uplinks from neighboring countries would be far more useful. Starlink even more so, but that’s a whole another beast to manage for various reasons. And then there’s things like microwave links which can give you even gigabits of bandwidth across 10-20km.

      • kungen@feddit.nu
        1·
        2 days ago

        You’re also missing the most important part: that modern voice calls have extreme amounts of compression on it. So even if you were able to modulate the connection correctly, it’d be even slower than the slowest POTS dialup.

        • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          There’s a ton of things I left out as they’re not really relevant for the discussion. Back when phone line modems were the only option for me to connect to the internet even dialing to different area code in my country took away a ton of bandwidth and it was more expensive. As you know, that 50kbps is pretty much the best case scenario and even on that case it’s practically useless on todays internet/www.

          In rural Belarus with soviet era cabling you’d be lucky to get even a half of that so on the modern web, with image downloads and javascript disabled, it’d still take several minutes to get a single news article to your screen. Our government owned news outlet still offers a web based rendering of teletext-service (and the real thing too) from the 70’s and it’s pretty much just pure text with very little overhead included and even with that you can only get about 10 words per second with 50kbps line.

          And in reality, where things have overhead and theoretical maximum is very rarely reached, it’s more than likely that you can read faster than you can move information over a dial-up line.