Idioms

dial up

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dial up

1. verb To call someone on the telephone. In this usage, a noun or pronoun can be used between "dial" and "up." Well, then dial Joe up and see what he has to say about all this! Billy, if you won't listen to me, I'll have no choice but to dial up your parents. Hey, dial up the pizza place and order a couple of large pies, my treat.
2. noun A method of connecting to the Internet via a telephone line. In this usage, the phrase is usually hyphenated. Remember the terrible sound that dial-up used to make? Yikes. Back in the days of dial-up, no one in the house could be on the phone if someone else was online. We didn't even have dial-up Internet in grade school, so playing The Oregon Trail was the epitome of excitement.
3. adjective Describing a method of connecting to the Internet via a telephone line. In this usage, the phrase is usually hyphenated. Remember how slow dial-up Internet used to be? Yikes. Now that Wi-Fi is the norm, I think I blocked dial-up Internet out of my memory. You kids have no room to complain about Internet quality when you didn't live through the dial-up era.
See also: dial, up
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.

dial up

v.
To telephone someone or something: I dialed up my dentist and made an appointment. Would you dial your sister up and ask her what time she's coming over?
See also: dial, up
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs. Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
Likewise, if a customer pays a monthly fee for unlimited dial-up access, their current supplier almost certainly provides an equivalent broadband deal for less.
Its analysis shows that pay-per-minute dial-up customers who surf the net for just two hours per week could save money by switching to broadband.
With a minimum number of user prompts, the firewall is an easy to use, yet highly powerful defense for both dial-up and high-speed connections.
According to the company, the Accelerated Dial-up generates no extra costs, the users just need to dial Mistral's 0845 number instead of their existing dial-up number.
Sky Fiber also promises several benefits for the average dial-up customer: simple installation, speeds of five to 10 times faster than their current service and the absence of phone line tie-ups.
Although the most convenient way to get everyone's computer linked would be to use your own dial-up telephone connection--where anyone on your staff can just call directly into the office on a dedicated line--that approach would be very expensive.
With this feature, when a device failure prevents connectivity through the network, management connectivity to the router/switch console can alternatively be made through a dial-up connection.
According to Jason Krauss, president of Wired Environments, "Prior to our new nationwide dial-up offering, telecommunications customers worried that dial-up access would have limited availability, especially after all the free dial-up providers disappeared.
This nation-wide broadband network delivers leading-edge interactive and multi-media applications and services about 100 times faster than traditional analog modem dial-up.
The second impetus for change was the development of less expensive dial-up ATMs.
cities could maintain a relatively inexpensive dial-up Internet access account in the United States that would allow him to make calls back to Europe at a fraction of the usual cost.
Using a dial-up mode over the public network can be frustrating, because access is seldom immediate.
The PLC was supposed to supervise the communication, the dial-up and the downloading of data, and send the output signals to the chart recorder.
* Use password protected computer dial-up telephones to reduce the possibility of an unauthorized user source of contamination.
It opted to integrated the IP-based solution from TNS into its new till system, removing dial-up and ISDN line rental charges and reducing communication costs.
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