cheap fast youtube downloads for dialup?

Could someone please direct me to a source for faster downloads of videos such as youtube using dialup? It always takes me a long time to download anything and sometimes my connection times out. I can't afford anything better than dialup right now. I am using Firefox. I have the basic ZoneAlarm firewall installed and am running it at the highest security. Thanks and sorry for my incompetence.

Sorry, but there's nothing anyone can do. Dial up is slow compared to most videos on YouTube. Think of your Internet connection as a water hose and the YouTube video as a swimming pool. Sure you can fill the pool with a garden hose, but it's going to take a long time. There's only so much water that will flow through the hose at a time and there are no tricks to getting more out of a slow connection. You have to upgrade to a larger connection to get more data flow.

Dial up still exists?

Thanks dbates. Is there anyway to zip information like mpegs, mp3s etc. so they can be unzipped on the other end or is that how winzip works? also is there something like bit torrent that would work for me? It seems like I'm really missing out on some good info in the threads I'm interested in. Thankyou very much for everyones time.

Most video and audio files you find on the Internet are already compressed so zipping them does little to speed up the transfer. There is a low bandwith option in the ATS store that will help with this site (by not showing avatars) but the rest of the Interent isn't that friendly.

Thanks again dbates you are much appreciated and yes dialup still exists and I know there are others on this site that are much smarter than I am who seem to be using it with success. Thankyou.

reply to post by michial


What's your average download rate? When you dial up at what speed do you connect?

reply to post by iCEdTenG


does it matter? at best they're getting 53kbit because that's what the phone companies allow (even with a 56k modem.) divide by 8 = ~7kb/s which isn't enough to do streaming video of any kind really. you can do some lower quality audio streams, but that's about it. i can almost guarantee that they aren't even reaching 7kb/s though. dbates was right in both his posts. not much more to it than you just need a faster pipe. =)

Yeah it does from what the OP says it is taking an extremely long time to get the video going (could be mistaken though as no actual time is given). He should at least be able to get one running in about 10-15 minutes. If he is connecting at a lower speed due to line quality or other issues at say half the speed then finding out what is causing the lower speeds could help him. I'm currently shaped atm (damn australian internet and low usage plans) which means my connection is about 64kbps just a bit above dialup yet i can still watch youtube vids though very slow.
At my old house i had dialup (going back about 3 years now) but would only connect at really low speeds about 24kbps i think at some times. I would only be able to get about 3kb/s at most. So this post is really to see if there is something else that could be affecting his speed though slow at dialup 3kb/s vs 7-8kb/s is a big difference.

From my experience, most dial-up connections get from 5k - 6k as a download speed. 7k would be a near miracle to achieve. YouTube is slow for me at times even with a cable modem on a 2.5 MB connection that achieves download speeds of over 150k on most sites, 400+ on the better ones. I can just picture that you're in the middle of streaming and YouTube hiccups. Then you have to start all over again.

What i was trying to say in my other post is... if the OP has speed issues on top of the slow speeds associated with dialup then investigating this could be beneficial. If he's only connecting at half the speed then 30 min download vs a 15 min download is quite a big difference. However dbates is right dial up is always going to be slow and the only real option is to upgrade to broadband.

Hello again and sorry it took so long to reply. Thankyou again for all the help and advice. My average speed is 52K and my average download speed is between 4 and 6. Not really bad I guess. Its just that if I'm downloading, I can't really multi task as my connection wants to time out; usually just when I get up to get a coffee or go to the john. I like to look at this site with multiple tabs open for different topics but if I try to download at the same time things go awry rapidly. With all the great stuff to look at on here, I've decided to forgo the pleasure of looking at the videos everyone is posting. I love it when people are kind enough to upload individual frames though. Anyways, I'm glad I found this forum on here as I found some other good advice on some other computer issues. Thankyou very much.

Hey Michial seems your getting the average dialup speed. Browsing multiple sites while trying to download is not the best for dialup. There is a program or firefox addon that allows you to save/download youtube and other similar vids to your HD perhaps you could try this and put it to download when your not using your computer. I haven't used it myself so don't know where to get it from or if it's any good but I'm sure other ATSers would know

Originally posted by michial
Could someone please direct me to a source for faster downloads of videos such as youtube using dialup?

There's 2 ways actually:

1. Do you have a mobile phone which supports 3G? It can go up to 384kbps which means you can transfer data at 48KiloBytes per second (384/8), which is good enough for youtube.

2. If you have a wireless network card installed, ask your neighbor whether they have wifi. Perhaps you can share the network and split the bill.