AOL Dial-Up Internet Is Dead

Remember the times when you had to make sure no one in your household was using the phone before logging online? The age of dial-up internet is distant now, with broadband and fiber internet being present in most households, but the service has been kept around. Now, though, it’s going offline in less than a couple of months.

AOL (which is now owned by Yahoo and has been bought out and sold off several times in the last few years) has announced that it will be taking its iconic dial-up service offline on September 30th, just about 51 days from the time this post was published. AOL’s dial-up service, first launched as America Online, was introduced in 1991, but the Internet began actually shaping up into something similar to what it looks like today through the mid-to-late 90s. After a whopping 34 years, though, it’s finally going offline, putting the nail in the coffin of an old, and forgotten by many, era of the Internet.

On a help page on AOL’s website, AOL says it “routinely evaluates its products and services” and that “this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.”

To be fair, some of you might be surprised that dial-up internet is still around at all. The current minimum bandwidth requirements to get basically anything on the internet done these days vastly overpowers what dial-up can do—gigabit is common in many households, while the venerable dial-up standard can do a mere 56 kilobits per second, and line noise and other factors could bring that down even more. That can easily make any browsing session extremely frustrating and time-consuming, even if you’re just searching for something on Google quickly. Loading a website could take several minutes, and that’s if it doesn’t just eventually time out.

It was mostly kept around as a way for old computers from the 90s that didn’t support broadband or fiber to have some access to the internet. Technically, you can still connect a modern computer to a dial-up connection—the option for connecting to dial-up is still in Windows 11 if you go to Settings > Network & internet, and clicking on it will bring up a Windows 7-era menu to set up the connection. Years ago, it was estimated that only 0.3% of Americans were using dial-up internet by 2017, and that number has probably dropped sharply over the past eight years. It’s a miracle it has been kept around for this long. AOL services, while they still include dial-up, don’t advertise this fact, and most people just pay for their bundles that include services such as McAfee and LastPass (please don’t use LastPass).

It’s the end of an era, for sure. The good part is that if you’re still on dial-up, there are many other options you can check out. If there are no fiber/broadband providers where you live, you can probably check out wireless home internet solutions.

Source: AOL via Bluesky