You're also missing the most important part: that modern voice calls have extreme amounts of compression on it. So even if you were able to modulate the connection correctly, it'd be even slower than the slowest POTS dialup.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

There's a ton of things I left out as they're not really relevant for the discussion. Back when phone line modems were the only option for me to connect to the internet even dialing to different area code in my country took away a ton of bandwidth and it was more expensive. As you know, that 50kbps is pretty much the best case scenario and even on that case it's practically useless on todays internet/www.

In rural Belarus with soviet era cabling you'd be lucky to get even a half of that so on the modern web, with image downloads and javascript disabled, it'd still take several minutes to get a single news article to your screen. Our government owned news outlet still offers a web based rendering of teletext-service (and the real thing too) from the 70's and it's pretty much just pure text with very little overhead included and even with that you can only get about 10 words per second with 50kbps line.

And in reality, where things have overhead and theoretical maximum is very rarely reached, it's more than likely that you can read faster than you can move information over a dial-up line.