Reader Andrew recently asked:
“Also, how well does Zonbu work over dial-up? Not every place in U.S. has affordable access to high speed broadband. Given it reliance on network storage, it seems that large files would not be ideal. Could you run some speed test for S3 over dial-up and broadband, that might be of interest to your readers.”
I’m afraid this is going to be a short post…
The Zonbu & dial-up are not going to play nicely together. There just isn’t any extra overhead in which to move the storage files, your web browsing would suffer measurably.
The network is part of the Zonbu model.
Moving multi-megabyte files (even something as small as a digital photo or MP3 file) over dial-up is just not worth it.
I launched one of the first broadband services in North America and that was almost 10 years ago. Before that I founded a dial-up ISP and then ran network operations for a regional dial-up ISP. I can say with some authority that the Zonbu isn’t the answer to any questions you need to ask that involve the phrase “dial-up”.
-Mr. Zonbu
Real life with the Zonbu Mini-PC 
But to be fair, in this day and age, any high pumping of data back and forth – i.e. video streaming-downloading, music downloading or even just plain web surfing these days, suffers over dial-up. And there is now only a fairly small part of the country that has no broadband, and prices definately vary, but most places have at least DSL via the local phone company if not cable.