Dialup.world Is a Four-Modem Dial-Up ISP with WebTV Support, Built From Spares and Scrap

Pinargio Pizza and friends are bringing back the community internet service provider (ISP), launching a four-line dial-up ISP from salvaged junk and spare parts — offering connection speeds up to a blazing 33.6kbps and WebTV compatibility to boot.

"We cobbled together a free-to-use dial-up ISP out of trash and spare parts," Pizza explains of the project. "dialup.world is composed of four modems for simultaneous connections delivering speeds up to 33.6k. This is currently a bunch of USR Sportsters hooked into Linux, but we are currently working on setups with Cisco gear, as well as some musings in 56k, other weird dial-up appliances, and retro networking."

For those who have known nothing but always-on broadband, dial-up connectivity seems like something from another world: you connected a modem to what was most likely your only telephone line and rang a number, at which point your computer would scream robotically at the answering system and negotiate an audio-based data connection. If anyone in the house picked up a phone, you'd get kicked off — and if anyone tried to call you while you were online, they'd get a busy tone.

Despite these drawbacks, and the slow speeds available from such a connection, dial-up connectivity brings back fond memories for many — and it's these dialup.world targets with its free service. "Using an Asterisk-based PBX (Private Branch eXchange) running on a Raspberry Pi," Pizza explains, "I can connect to voip.ms over the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) protocol and this will allow calls to that number to come in to my PBX.

"So somehow we need to turn these digital calls into individual calls that travel over phone lines to modems. To do this I am using a Grandstream HT704, which is a four-line ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter) device. This small gray box has one RJ-45 connection on it for Ethernet that I'll plug into the same network as my Raspberry Pi, and four RJ-11 jacks for 2-wire phone cables."

The remainder of the system is made up of four salvaged dial-up modems, linked to the ATA, and a gateway system: a Libre Computer Le Potato single-board computer. "The last weird thing I did," Pizza notes, "was flash Tomato firmware onto an old router and use it as a hard firewall between the PC and my Internet."

There's a final added feature to the ISP, too: "We also supply dial-up access to the WebTV Redialed project — webtv.zone — which means if you dig your WebTV out of storage and hook it into a phone line," Pizza adds, "it just works with no modification needed on your part!"

More information, along with pleasingly lo-fi imagery, is available on the dialup.world website.