[naz]

It was awful having to use AOL dialup in the UK. My parents used it (it was one of the few ISPs with freephone) so I was stuck with it. The problem was AOL routed all traffic through Virginia. For someone in the UK that meant a minimum of ~130ms ping, ruining online games and making everything super slow

[mickeyp]

130ms ping with dialup was actually quite low. I suffered far higher with my dialup and it was a local isp.

[giantrobot]

For games I would have done awful things for a ping that low on dial-up. More typical for me was over 200ms. I did everything I could to tweak MTU and modem settings but could never break the 200ms barrier (that I remember).

[sixothree]

Routing through virginia persisted for a lot of ISPs well into the broadband days. Whatever could be the reason for that...

[nly]

What? No Freeserve?

[pixelesque]

Freeserve was free to buy, but you paid for it with the 0845 number (like with a lot of other ISPs in the late 90s) you had to dial.