Dialling with a 2,400 bps modem? Use +1 610 922 1996. As of 25 August the Texas and Boston numbers answer V.32bis only, 4,800 to 14,400 bps, and will not train a modem that can only do 2,400.
LiteNet Connectivity Solutions is a dial-up ISP that runs today. A modem calls a real telephone number, a carrier answers, the modems train, PPP comes up, and the 2026 web arrives rebuilt small enough to read over it. Three numbers reach the same pool of lines, thirty-two calls at a time.
Or +1 610 922 1996 — Pennsylvania · +1 857 342 5877 — Boston.
Every number reaches the same pool. Which of the two engines answers a given number is set on the server rather than here; the pool default is V.22bis at 2,400 bps, which answers any modem.
1,444 B/s
Goodput measured on the 14,400 bps path with incompressible data. That is 80% of the carrier rate; the remainder is V.42 LAPM framing.
98.4%
Of bbc.com/news removed on the way through, cold cache: 380,079 B upstream, 5,933 B delivered to the modem.
32 lines
Calls LiteNet carries at once, across all three numbers. The thirty-third caller gets a busy signal, as they would have in 1996.
Free for life
For founding members, while LiteNet is in preview. Kept free for those accounts permanently — see what that means.
Nothing here is an emulator or a museum piece. The call is a real call, the carrier is a real carrier, and the pages come from the live Internet a few seconds before you read them.
Asterisk 22, built from source, answers the call over SIP and hands the raw audio to the modem process through app_audiosocket. The codec is locked to ulaw with transcode:prevent, because a transcoder in the path destroys modem tones.
A slot's speed belongs to the engine answering it, not to the caller, because a modem's modulation cannot be known before the call is answered. V.22bis at 2,400 bps answers everyone and measures 275 B/s. V.32bis runs 4,800 to 14,400 bps with V.42 error control and V.42bis compression, and does not answer a modem that can only do 2,400 bps. V.34 does not train over this path at all. Which engine a number answers on is set on the server, per number; it is not a property of the number you can read off this page.
Every page is parsed, stripped of what a period browser cannot render, scored for its actual article, downgraded and re-serialised. The byte budget is set in seconds of line time rather than in bytes, so the same page is allowed to be larger on a fast line than on a slow one.
The transform is transparent. It listens at the PPP gateway, 10.64.0.1:80, and port 80 is redirected to it. There is no proxy host and no port number to type into Trumpet Winsock, MacTCP or the Netscape preferences dialog. You dial, you open a browser, it works.
Thirty-two calls can be up at the same time, each with its own modem worker, its own PPP session and its own address out of 10.64.0.0/16. That is every slot the pool has. The ceiling is measured rather than chosen — a soft modem has to feed the DSP every 20 ms for the whole call, so it is re-measured on the hardware answering before it is allowed to move. The negotiated line rate of every session is written down as it trains, and the transform reads it to pick that session's budget.
Texas on +1 940 548 3638, which spells 940-LITENET; Pennsylvania on +1 610 922 1996; Boston on +1 857 342 5877, which spells 857-DIALUPS. All three enter the same admission point. The standard numbers share thirty-two lines; the 14.4k number has its own thirty-two. See coverage for who can reach them without paying for the call.
That is bbc.com/news, fetched live and rebuilt on the way to the modem. Over the 14,400 bps line it finishes in 4.1 s instead of 263 s. Over the 2,400 bps line it still finishes in 21.6 s — which is to say the slowest thing we sell is faster than the modern page would have been on the fastest.
| Page | Upstream | Through LiteNet | Saved | At 14,400 bps | At 2,400 bps |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bbc.com/news | 380,079 B | 5,933 B | 98.4% | 4.1 s (was 263 s) | 21.6 s |
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem | 505,622 B | 24,703 B | 95.1% | 17.1 s (was 350 s) | 89.8 s |
| news.ycombinator.com | 34,863 B | 16,078 B | 53.9% | 11.1 s | 58.5 s |
| text.npr.org | 6,095 B | 2,794 B | 54.2% | 1.9 s | 10.2 s |
Hacker News only comes down 53.9% because there is almost nothing in it to remove: it is already a list of links with no images, no fonts and very little script. Pages that are mostly page, rather than mostly payload, benefit least. We publish those rows for the same reason we publish the good ones.
The short version. The full path, with the packet counts and the reasons for each decision, is on how it works.
Your modem calls one of the three numbers, say +1 940 548 3638. The carrier delivers the call to our server over SIP.
The call is answered, held in ulaw end to end, and its audio is passed frame by frame to a modem worker over AudioSocket.
The engine behind the number you dialled brings the line up: V.22bis at 2,400 bps, or V.32bis at 4,800 to 14,400 bps with V.42 error control and V.42bis compression. The negotiated rate is recorded for the life of the session.
Your username and password go over PAP, and you are given an address from 10.64.0.0/16 with 10.64.0.1 as the gateway. You are on the Internet at this point.
Your requests reach the transform at the gateway without any setting on your side. It fetches the live page, picks a budget from your measured goodput — text, low graphics or graphics — and sends back HTML your browser was built to parse.
The measurements behind everything else on this page are written up at engineering.
Founding members
LiteNet Connectivity Solutions is in preview. While it is, service is free — and accounts opened during preview stay free for the life of the account. That is what founding member means here, and it is not a promotional rate that quietly expires.
Very low-cost plans may be introduced later to keep the project alive. If that happens, it will not apply to founding accounts, and it will be priced to cover the lights rather than to make money.
Three numbers into the same thirty-two lines. Your account works on any of them. Set your modem to one and dial.
Or +1 610 922 1996 from Pennsylvania · +1 857 342 5877 from Boston.