AOL to Unplug Its Dial-Up Internet Service After 30 Years

Greater than 30 years since AOL turned synonymous with floppy discs and CDs providing free web, its dial-up service has remained in operation. That each one modifications subsequent month, when it’ll formally shut down the long-antiquated technique of getting on-line.

“AOL routinely evaluates its services and products and has determined to discontinue Dial-up Web. This service will now not be obtainable in AOL plans,” the corporate wrote in a statement lately posted to its web site. “Because of this, on September 30, 2025 this service and the related software program, the AOL Dialer software program and AOL Defend browser, that are optimized for older working methods and dial-up web connections, shall be discontinued.”

This choice might have simply been made a number of years in the past, as The New York Times experiences that, in 2023, solely 163,000 households in the USA had been utilizing dial-up as their sole technique of web entry. For context, that determine represents solely 0.1% of web subscriptions nationwide.

Associated Video

AOL started in 1983 as an organization known as Management Video Company, providing on-line providers for the Atari 2600 online game console. It was then relaunched as Quantum Pc Companies in 1985, this time providing on-line providers first for the Commodore 64 and 128 computer systems after which Apple II and Macintosh computer systems.

In 1989, this firm was renamed to America On-line after parting methods with Apple. It started providing dial-up service below that title in 1991, serving as a fierce competitor to the likes of Prodigy and CompuServe.

Due to an promoting marketing campaign that broadly distributed floppy discs and CDs that gave entry to free trials, it turned the dominant dial-up service inside a couple of years. AOL’s consumer base grew to 10 million by 1995 and doubled that quantity by 2000.

At its peak, AOL was such part of popular culture that its new e-mail notification sound impressed the title of Nora Ephron’s 1998 movie, You’ve Received Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

With the rise of a lot quicker broadband web, nonetheless, AOL’s fortunes as an organization quickly dipped, due to an ill-advised merger with Time Warner in 2001. AOL was ultimately spun off in 2009 and later purchased by Verizon in 2015.

After all, this isn’t the primary AOL service that peaked within the ’90s to be discontinued. The corporate shuttered its instant messenger, AIM, in 2017.