AOL will end its dial-up internet service (yes, it's still operating)
If this is how you learned that AOL's dial-up still exists -- presumably you read this on a broadband internet connection -- you're not alone.
The service, seen by many as a relic of the early days of the internet, will be discontinued Sept. 30 along with its associated software, the company said. AOL made the announcement quietly via a statement on its help portal Friday: "AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue dial-up internet."
For many, the most surprising part of the news may have been that AOL was still offering dial-up service at all. In 2023, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, an estimated 163,000 households in the United States were using only dial-up for internet service -- representing just over 0.1% of the nation's household internet subscriptions.
But back in the 1990s, AOL's dial-up tone -- a series of beeps, bursts of static and earsplitting screeches -- and "You've got mail" email alert were the soundtrack for many Americans as they learned how to navigate the internet.
The service joins a growing list of early internet products to be retired in recent years. Microsoft discontinued Skype in May and Internet Explorer in 2022. AOL's own instant messaging service, AIM, which connected a generation to their classmates and crushes, was shut down in 2017.
The AOL announcement also prompted nostalgia online for the dial-up era, when webpages took minutes to load rather than a second; picking up a landline telephone meant losing your internet connection; and many viewed the World Wide Web through a lens of excitement, wonder and possibility.
AOL was also a key plot element in the 1998 romantic comedy "You've Got Mail," in which characters played by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan fall in love over AOL messages. The company's CDs, offering free trials of internet time measured in hours, were a familiar form of junk mail across the United States in the 1990s. In 2000, America Online, as the company was known then, was the world's largest internet company.
But the service fell into obscurity as dial-up connections were replaced by high-speed lines. In 2004, one dial-up user told The New York Times that he would "bring a newspaper and sit and read," as he waited for data to download.
(Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second; modern connections in the United States are, on average, several thousand times faster.)
In 2015, AOL's dial-up service had more than 2 million users, bringing in more than $40 million in revenue a month. AOL, which is owned by Yahoo, did not release information about how many people use its dial-up service now.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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