Dial-up Internet access

Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telephone line. Dial-up connections use modems to decode audio signals into data to send to a router or computer, and to encode signals from the latter two devices to send to another modem at the ISP.

Dial-up internet reached its peak popularity during the dot-com bubble with the likes of ISPs such as Sprint, EarthLink, MSN Dial-up, NetZero, Prodigy, and America Online (more commonly known as AOL). This was in large part due to the fact that broadband internet did not become widely used until well into the 2000s. Since then, most dial-up access has been replaced by broadband.