Canadian man tries using dial-up internet in 2025 to see just how bad it is
Published on Dec 19, 2025 at 2:07 AM (UTC+4)
by Claire Reid
Last updated on Dec 19, 2025 at 12:42 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Kate Bain
This tech expert has taken a trip down memory lane, attempting to use dial-up internet in 2025 to see if it really was as bad as he remembered it.
Those of you who are above a certain age might remember the days of dial-up internet connections.
After an extremely noisy connection process, you could expect super-slow speeds and pages that took minutes to load.
But, at the time, 56 kbit/s was the best that was on offer and was used by millions of people across the world.
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How would the dial-up internet connection handle modern websites?
It wasn’t until the late 1990s when commercial broadband arrived on the scene and quickly took over.
For some context, around 40 percent of Americans were using dial-up in the early 2000s, compared to just three percent in the early 2010s – and these days, dial-up is all but dead.
In fact, back in September, AOL finally pulled the plug on its dial-up service after more than 30 years.
At the time, the company said more than 163,000 Americans still used dial-up in 2025.
In honor of AOL bowing out, tech expert Linus Sebastian from the Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel decided to give dial-up a go, to see just how slow it was in 2025.
He wanted to know how, or even if, dial-up would cope with some of the biggest websites of today, such as YouTube and Reddit – and here’s how that went.
Unsurprisingly, the test didn’t get off to a flying start.
After trying to view Wikipedia, the sluggish connection gave out, and he was hit with a ‘request timed out’ error message.
“Did I just forget how horrible this was?” he asked.
After making some adjustments to the computer’s settings, the tech expert did manage to get the page to load, albeit very slowly.
While Wikipedia did eventually fire up, the YouTuber noted that online shopping would be almost impossible.
Using Amazon as an example, he explained that the pages were so full of images and videos that loading them with a dial-up connection would be a nightmare.
As anyone who has used dial-up internet can attest to, there’s a lot of waiting around.
The sluggish speeds left the YouTuber feeling ‘so bored’.
What about video streaming on YouTube?
Dial-up had a theoretical top speed of 56 kbit/s, but in reality, the connection was usually a whole lot slower.
In fact, in this test, the connection was so slow that it couldn’t even load the page to test the internet speed.
Not ideal.
He then attempted to watch a video on YouTube.
Of course, streaming wasn’t an option, but he was able to eventually play a small bit of a clip by allowing it to buffer first.
The tech expert did have some advice about how to speed things up, including switching off images in Chrome, only having one tab open at a time, and switching off automatic updates.
But he certainly didn’t give the process a 5-star review.
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Claire Reid is a journalist who hails from the UK but is now living in New Zealand. She began her career after graduating with a degree in Journalism from Liverpool John Moore’s University and has more than a decade of experience, writing for both local newspapers and national news sites. Claire covers a wide variety of topics, with a special focus on cars, technology, planes, cryptocurrency, and luxury.
