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, twenty-four calls at a time. Two of them answer any modem at 2,400 bps; the Boston number answers a V.32bis modem at up to 14,400 and will not answer one that is slower.
Pennsylvania, 2,400 bps, answers any modem. So does +1 940 548 3638 (940-LITENET). For up to 14,400 bps dial +1 857 342 5877 (857-DIALUPS), which needs a V.32bis 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.
24 lines
Calls this host carries at once, across all three numbers, measured. The twenty-fifth 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 22.10.1, 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 live PSTN call carried 13.2 s of clean audio: 661 RTP packets for 660 frames, zero loss.
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 on +1 610 922 1996 and +1 940 548 3638, and measures 275 B/s. V.32bis, on +1 857 342 5877, runs 4,800 to 14,400 bps with V.42 error control and V.42bis compression, and does not answer a 2,400-only modem: zero of ten tries. V.34 does not train over this path at all.
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.
Twenty-four 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. Thirty-two slots exist, but a soft modem has to feed the DSP every 20 ms for the whole call, and twenty-four is what this host does that for: zero late frames at sixteen and at twenty-four, 426 of them at thirty-one. The negotiated line rate of every session is written down as it trains, and the transform reads it to pick that session's budget.
Pennsylvania on +1 610 922 1996, Boston on +1 857 342 5877, which spells 857-DIALUPS, and +1 940 548 3638, which spells 940-LITENET. All three enter the same admission point and draw from the same twenty-four lines; what differs is the speed each one answers at. 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 +1 610 922 1996. 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.
On the Boston number, V.32bis brings the line up at 4,800 to 14,400 bps with V.42 error control and V.42bis compression. On the other two, V.22bis brings it up at 2,400. 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.
Everything else on this page is measured, and the measurements are written up at engineering. A test without evidence is not a pass, on the site as much as in the repository.
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 twenty-four lines. Pennsylvania and 940-LITENET answer any modem at 2,400 bps; Boston answers a V.32bis modem at up to 14,400. Set your modem to one of them and dial.
Or +1 857 342 5877 from Boston, for a V.32bis modem, or +1 940 548 3638 at 2,400 bps.