I love the CompTIA Network+ exam it's one of my favorite certifications there are, however, there's a
few topics on there I'm not a big fan of and this is one of them.
It's Dial-Up using your old plain old telephone service your POTs or your publicly switched telephone
network PSTN to connect to the Internet.
Now don't get me wrong.
I lived on dial up for many many years but we have newer technologies now. Cable with DSL fiber.
Heck even my iPhone just automatically connects to the Internet.
That makes the dial up kind of a bit of a dated technology.
However it's on the test.
So let's give it some quick coverage.
I actually have to laugh my sound person was looking at my modem right here and going wow I've never
seen one before so come back to the old days when grandpappy Mike and let's talk about Dial-Up.
It all starts right here.
This is an external modem.
Now if you take a look at this modem you're going to see it's got three connections that are important.
One of these connects to your telephone outlet.
One of these allows you to plug in a telephone so you can use the telephone when you're not on the internet
with it.
And then there's this big serial connection that plugs into the back of your computer.
So this is what we would call it external modem it sits outside your computer.
There's also internal modems and that usually manifests itself as a card that you snap in your computer
and then these RJ-11 Jacks hanging there for you to plug into. The thing about dial up that you have
to appreciate is that it was the first thing that the vast majority of us ever saw as a way to connect
to the Internet.
It was the first common technology. Dial up runs at a whopping 56 k.
Now granted it uses the same 64 K DS0 that our voice uses but because of overhead and maintenance we
can only use about 56 of the 64 k to actually transfer data. 56 kilobits per second.
Can you imagine loading a yahoo dot com Web portal at 56 K I don't want to think about it anymore.
However it's out there.
So what I want to do is show you how this works.
Now keep in mind the first thing you're going to do before you buy a modem is that you have to buy a
connection.
So you would go to a company and they would give you a $15 a month dial up account.
And for that what they gave you in return was a telephone number and you had to dial that telephone
number with your modem to actually create the connection.
So let's go through the process of setting up the modem and created connection to a dial up ISP.
All right.
Now to actually create a dial up connection.
Pretty much every version of Windows has something within their network to say set up a connection so
I'm going to set up a connection and it says how am I going to connect I'm going to connect to the Internet
in Windows 8 and it says hey you're already connected.
We'll set up connection anyway.
So I go for pick a dial up connection, it doesn't like my modem I don't care, I'm going to say set up the
connection anyway and pretty much here is what you do you're gonna have to type in
the telephone number that was provided to you by your ISP for you to connect.
And then there will be a username and password that your ISP also gave you.
What's interesting here is I pretty much guarantee that this is going to be using PPP, point to point protocol,
to create this connection.
So we'll come in type this in.
I remember it Connection name usually want to give it some name because you would have to dial up to
different numbers when you're in different towns so the important thing to appreciate about Dial up
is that it's incredibly slow.
It is of all the what we called Last Mile connection options
by far the slowest one out there.
It's not even really a good backup anymore. I kept my dial ups for years even long after cable and DSL
and native ether net and all these other came along.
Then it's only been fairly recent that I finally appreciated that dial up is so slow and so old that
it really doesn't have any much bearing today.
However for the Network+ make sure you know that we need a modem to use it that you actually have
to get an ISP connection that will provide you a phone number and a username and password and that you
would actually connect using the PPP protocol which is built into every version of Windows and Linux and
Mac and has been for the last 15 years and you're up and connected to a very very slow internet.