A PPP account
A username and password in /etc/ppp/pap-secrets, authenticated with PAP when the link comes up. Your dialler sends it; pppd checks it; the session is attributed to it. No web portal, no captive page, no click-through.
Service
A dial-up
account.
One telephone call, one PPP login, and a machine built before the web had images gets a real address on the present-day Internet. Below is exactly what that account consists of and exactly how fast it is — measurements rather than promises.
Three dial-in numbers
32 lines at once
Free for founding members
What a subscriber gets
Six concrete things. Nothing here is a tier, an upsell or a future roadmap item — it is the list of what the running system hands you when your carrier trains.
An address out of 10.64.0.0/16
Every line is numbered inside the subscriber pool, one address per line, for as long as the call lasts. The gateway is 10.64.0.1. You are behind NAT — a single public address, 163.123.239.32, which every line on the pool leaves from.
DNS that answers
A dnsmasq resolver on 10.64.0.1, handed to you over IPCP so you do not type it in. It is bound to the dial-up pool and the loopback only, never to the public interface — an open resolver on a public address is an amplification vector, and this one is deliberately not reachable from the Internet.
Transparent page transformation
Port 80 out of your line is redirected by nftables into retroproxy, which rewrites the modern web into HTML 3.2 on the way past. Your browser believes it is talking to the origin. There is no proxy setting to configure, which matters because there is no proxy setting in Trumpet Winsock worth explaining over the telephone.
32 shared lines
The carrier trunk group is provisioned MaxIn=32, the answering pool has thirty-two slots, one thread each, and this host answers thirty-two at once. That ceiling is measured, not guessed: a soft modem has to hand the DSP a frame every 20 ms for the whole call, so the figure is re-measured on the hardware that is answering before it is allowed to change. The thirty-third call is rejected — you get a busy, the way you would have in 1996, instead of everyone on the box degrading at once.
All three dial-in numbers
+1 940 548 3638 in Texas — 940-LITENET; +1 610 922 1996 in Pennsylvania; +1 857 342 5877 in Boston — 857-DIALUPS. All three land on the same dialplan handler and the same pool of lines, and your account works on any of them. Which engine answers a given number is set on the server and is not something this page can tell you — we will, when the account is made. Coverage explains what a call to them costs you.
How fast it actually is
Two modem engines, both measured on this system, neither rounded up. Neither one can do the other's job, so a slot answers at its engine's speed rather than at yours. Goodput is application bytes per second — what a file transfer really moves, after the start and stop bits and the V.42 framing have taken their cut.
| Path | Line rate | Goodput | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| spandsp V.22bis (modemd) | 2,400 bps | 275 B/s | Running as a service |
| slmodem V.32bis (slmbridge) | 4,800–14,400 bps | 1,444 B/s (at 14,400) | Running as a service |
1,444 B/s is 80% of a 14,400 bps carrier, which is the right figure once LAPM framing is accounted for. The same 20 KB of zeros moves at 9,979 B/s — that is not a throughput claim, it is evidence that V.42bis compression is live.
A line's speed is a property of the engine that answered it, not of your modem, because the answering side has to commit before it can hear what you are. The V.22bis engine answers everyone, at 2,400 bps. The V.32bis engine reaches 14,400 bps and will not answer a modem that only does 2,400 bps at all. Which engine a number is on is held on the server, not here; the pool default is V.22bis at 2,400 bps, and there are thirty-two slots on the fast engine out of thirty-two.
And what that means for a real page
These are subscriber-facing measurements through the transformation engine, cold cache. The “was” figures are what the untouched page would have cost you on the same line.
| Page | Upstream | Over LiteNet | At 14.4k | At 2400 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| bbc.com/news | 380,079 B | 5,933 B | 4.1 s (was 263 s) | 21.6 s |
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem | 505,622 B | 24,703 B | 17.1 s (was 350 s) | 89.8 s |
| news.ycombinator.com | 34,863 B | 16,078 B | 11.1 s | 58.5 s |
| text.npr.org | 6,095 B | 2,794 B | 1.9 s | 10.2 s |
Setting expectations honestly
- Hacker News reduces by only 53.9% because it is already almost all links. The transformation cannot invent savings that are not there.
- Wikipedia misses the ten-second target at 17.1 s. It is a 505 KB article and 24.7 KB of what arrives is text a reader actually wants.
- Images are budgeted, not guaranteed. Below 400 B/s of goodput you get text and numbered image links; above 800 B/s you get up to six pictures at 480 px.
- HTTPS is not redirected. TLS terminates upstream at the proxy — a period browser cannot complete a modern handshake, and machines under about 40 MHz time out during key exchange.
- Outbound SMTP (25, 465, 587) and open-proxy ports are blocked at the firewall, and new flows are rate-limited. See Acceptable use.
- This is a small service run by one person. Tell us what your modem said when something does not work; that is the whole support process and it is genuinely useful.
Founding members
Free while we are in preview,
and free afterwards for anyone who joined during it
LiteNet Connectivity Solutions is in its infancy. While it is, the service is free — and an account opened in this period stays free for the life of that account. That is what founding member means here.
The paid plans below are real, and nothing is being charged for any of them today. Billing is built and switched off, and nothing can be charged while it stays off. The prices are published because a price that appears for the first time on an invoice is how people get treated badly, and because a founding member is entitled to see exactly what they are being kept out of paying.
| Plan | Price | Lines | Speed | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founding Member Free for life. Unlimited data, unlimited hours, any line speed. Granted to everyone who was here before LiteNet charged anybody anything, and never revoked. |
Freefree for life | 2 lines at once | whatever the two modems settle on | unmetered |
| LiteNet Standard The ordinary dial-up account: any available line, any speed it trains at. Priced but not billed -- billing is switched off ISP-wide. |
$9.95a month | one line at a time | whatever the two modems settle on | 5.00 GB a month |
| Guest A look at the service. Thirty days, one gigabyte, one session at a time. Suspends itself when it runs out rather than quietly continuing. |
Free | one line at a time | whatever the two modems settle on | 1.00 GB and 20 hours a month |
What happens after preview
Very low-cost plans may be introduced later, to keep the project alive and the lines answered. If that day comes:
- Founding accounts are not affected. Free means free, permanently, for anyone who joined during preview.
- Any future price would be set to cover running costs, not to make money.
- Nothing would change without being written here first.
There is no billing system today: no invoices, no card on file, nothing to cancel. Applying costs you nothing and commits you to nothing.
What you need on your end
Three things. If your machine had all three in 1996, it has all three now.
One
A modem
Anything that answers ATDT and negotiates V.22bis or V.32bis. Internal card, external brick with a row of lights, PCMCIA — it does not matter. Faster modems are welcome; they will train down to what the answering side offers.
Two
A phone line
A real copper line, or an ATA on your own VoIP service that can pass modem tones. The call is an ordinary long-distance call to a US number and your carrier bills it at whatever their rate is. LiteNet charges nothing for the call and cannot see what you were charged.
Three
A TCP/IP stack
Trumpet Winsock on Windows 3.1, Dial-Up Networking on Windows 95, MacTCP or Open Transport with FreePPP, AmiTCP on an Amiga, or the PPP that shipped with your Unix. It must speak PPP with PAP and take its address and resolver from the server. That is the whole requirement.
Apply
Ask for an account
Accounts are created by hand, because a few dozen of them is not a database problem. Tell us what you are dialling from and we will build the account around it — including which number to give you.
What comes back
A username, a password, the numbers to dial, and a short note on the settings for your particular stack. Nothing to install and no software to download — everything you need already shipped with your operating system. Then you dial, and either it works or you write back and tell us what the modem said, which is genuinely useful.
No guarantee of uptime, no guarantee of an answer within any particular number of days, and no support telephone number. One operator and thirty-two shared lines. Prefer email? dialup@litenet.tel reaches the same place.