After many years of connecting US subscribers to its on-line service and the web by means of phone traces, AOL lately introduced it’s lastly shutting down its dial-up modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marks the top of a expertise that served as the first gateway to the net for thousands and thousands of customers all through the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s.
AOL confirmed the shutdown date in a assist message to clients: “AOL routinely evaluates its services and has determined to discontinue Dial-up Web. This service will not be accessible in AOL plans.”
Together with the dial-up service, AOL introduced it would retire its AOL Dialer software program and AOL Protect browser on the identical date. The dialer software program managed the connection course of between computer systems and AOL’s community, whereas Protect was an internet browser optimized for slower connections and older working programs.
AOL’s dial-up service launched as “America On-line” in 1991 as a closed business on-line service, with dial-up roots extending again to Quantum Hyperlink for Commodore computer systems in 1985. Nonetheless, AOL did not present precise web entry but: The flexibility to browse the net, entry newsgroups, or use companies like gopher launched in 1994. Earlier than then, AOL customers may solely entry content material hosted on AOL’s personal servers.
When AOL lastly opened its gates to the web in 1994, web sites had been measured in kilobytes, photographs had been small and compressed, and video was primarily unattainable. The AOL service grew alongside the net itself, peaking at over 25 million subscribers within the early 2000s earlier than broadband adoption accelerated its decline.
In response to 2022 US Census knowledge, roughly 175,000 American households nonetheless connect with the web by means of dial-up companies. These customers sometimes stay in rural areas the place broadband infrastructure would not exist or stays prohibitively costly to put in.
For these customers, the options are restricted. Satellite tv for pc web now serves between 2 million and three million US subscribers break up between varied companies, providing speeds far exceeding dial-up however usually with knowledge caps and better latency. Conventional broadband by means of DSL, cable, or fiber-optic connections serves the overwhelming majority of US web customers however requires infrastructure investments that do not at all times make financial sense in sparsely populated areas.
The persistence of dial-up highlights the continuing digital divide in the US. Whereas city customers take pleasure in gigabit fiber connections, some rural residents nonetheless depend on the identical expertise that powered the web of 1995. Even primary duties like loading a contemporary webpage—designed with the belief of broadband speeds—can take minutes over a dial-up connection, or typically it would not work in any respect.
The hole between dial-up and fashionable web connections is staggering. A typical dial-up connection delivered 0.056 megabits per second, whereas immediately’s common fiber connection supplies 500 Mbps—almost 9,000 occasions quicker. To place this in perspective, downloading a single high-resolution picture that hundreds immediately on broadband would take a number of minutes on dial-up. A film that streams in actual time on Netflix would require days of downloading. However for thousands and thousands of People who lived by means of the dial-up period, these statistics inform solely a part of the story.
The Sound of the Early Web
For individuals who got here on-line earlier than broadband, dial-up meant a particular ritual: clicking the dial button, listening to your modem dial a neighborhood entry quantity, then listening to the distinctive handshake sequence—a cacophony of static, beeps, and hissing that indicated your pc was negotiating a reference to AOL’s servers. As soon as related, customers paid by the hour or by means of month-to-month plans that supplied restricted hours of entry.
The expertise labored by changing digital knowledge into audio indicators that traveled over commonplace phone traces, initially designed within the nineteenth century for voice calls. This meant customers could not obtain telephone calls whereas on-line, resulting in numerous household disputes over web time. The quickest shopper modems topped out at 56 kilobits per second underneath very best circumstances.
