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We have some customers still using dial-up in remote locations. After disabling HTTP and forcing them to use HTTPS, some of those offices have indicated they cannot connect.

I have searched online and only confirmed my prior knowledge so far - dial-up uses PSTN to connect to the internet and should be able to support HTTP/HTTPS. The only possible causes I can think of are platform supportability for our current TLS cipher suite. However, the customer is using a recent version of our software and working on Windows 7. LMK

7YR43L
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    `Does dial-up support HTTPS connections?` - Prior to dsl, cable, fiber, etc., etc. everyone browsed the internet via dial-up connections. I'd say the answer is a resounding yes. – joeqwerty Mar 22 '17 at 17:18
  • Are you running HTTPS on the default TCP port of 443 or using a non-standard custom port? Because the latter might be blocked by a firewall or other security software. – HBruijn Mar 22 '17 at 17:39

3 Answers3

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In theory, there is no reason why dial-up cannot do https. It is Level 7 protocol and dialup is on levels 1-3, so it even doesn't know there is any https (it is just pack of data).

Therefore there might be some limitation on the ISP side, like some proxy, protocol filtering etc. This must be communicated with ISP itself, but I personally don't even believe some provider will shut down HTTPS. Is there any other HTTPS-enabled site accessible? Facebook, twitter for example.

Ondra Sniper Flidr
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As explained by @Ondra Sniper Fildr, dial-up is simply one of several transport options one can use to join an IP network.

However, I think the situation might warrant some consideration when looking at your TLS setup.

Notably, I would highly recommend you look into the High Performance Browser Networking book's TLS chapter, which includes some rationale for, and recommendations to, try and optimise your TLS stack for low latency and (particularly relevant in your case) to reduce the number of round-trips added by TLS (typically 3, can be 1).

You might also want to consider enabling HTTP/2 if you can, to further optimise the connection.

The combination of both a tuned TLS setup and more efficient HTTP handling should yield a performance improvement for all your users, and should make the experience of using dial-up a little less painful for those that do so.

iwaseatenbyagrue
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In addition to the first answer of @Ondra Sniper Flindr

Most https sites has heavy weight content now. PSTN dialup speed can't be more 64Kbps or 128Kbps for ISDN connections. It takes more time to download this content but https protocol is very sensitivity of timeout and errors.

These connections often have many transmission errors, which can break https connection and all encrypted​ content must be reloaded.

Also Windows 7 often downloads it's updates which has usually 300MB per a week. The computer will take more one day for it with such speed. When you use https connection at this moment the connection timeout may occur.

It's important to have synchronized date and time for https encryption.

Mikhail Khirgiy
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