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.
Carrier answering on +1 610 922 1996
24 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, 178.156.130.90, in Ashburn, Virginia.
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.
24 shared lines
The carrier trunk group is provisioned MaxIn=32 and the answering pool has thirty-two slots, one thread each, but this host answers twenty-four at once. That ceiling is measured, not guessed: no late frames at sixteen or twenty-four, 426 of them at thirty-one, and collapse at thirty-eight. A soft modem has to hand the DSP a frame every 20 ms for the whole call. The twenty-fifth 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
+1 610 922 1996 in Pennsylvania, the original and the only one a call from the public telephone network has completed on; +1 857 342 5877 in Boston — 857-DIALUPS; and +1 940 548 3638 — 940-LITENET. All three land on the same dialplan handler and the same pool of lines, and your account works on any of them. Which one you dial decides which modem answers, and that decides your speed — see below. 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 the number you dial decides which of them picks up. 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 — 610 and 940) | 2,400 bps | 275 B/s | Running as a service |
| slmodem V.32bis (slmbridge — 857 only) | 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, on +1 610 922 1996 and +1 940 548 3638. The V.32bis engine is on +1 857 342 5877 alone and it will not answer a modem that only does 2,400 — ten attempts, zero connections. So 857 may get you up to 14,400 if your modem speaks V.32bis, and 610 or 940 gets you 2,400 and works.
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.
- No physical modem has dialled in yet. Every number above comes from a synthetic subscriber over a real SIP call. You would be among the first real callers, and you should expect to find things that way.
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.
| Plan | Price | Lines | Speed | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founding member open now, during preview |
$0.00/mo, for life | 24 shared, across all three numbers | 2,400 bps; up to 14,400 bps on +1 857 342 5877 if your modem does V.32bis | No metering, no quota, no session cap. Be reasonable; twenty-four lines is the whole company. |
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 a founding 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 twenty-four shared lines. Prefer email? [email protected] reaches the same place.