AOL turns off the internet dialing in September
After decades AOL has recently announced that it will eventually turn off its dialing modem service on September 30, 2025 by connecting US subscribers to the online service and the Internet via telephone lines. This announcement is the end of a technology that served as the main gateway to millions of users during the 1990s and early 2000.
AOL confirmed the shutdown date in a guide message to customers: “AOL normally evaluates its products and services and has decided to disconnect the Internet. The service will no longer be available in AOL programs.”
Along with the dial service, AOL announced that on the same date, it retired AOL Dialer and AOL Shield browser. Dialer software managed the connection process between computers and AOL network, while Shield was a web browser that was optimized for slower connections and older operating systems.
AOL dial service as “American Online” in 1991 as an online business online service, with dialing roots to return to the quantum link for Commodore computers in 1985. However, AOL still did not provide real access to the Internet: web browsing, access groups or services such as Gopher launched in 1994.
When AOL finally opened its gates to the Internet in 1994, the websites were measured at Kilobytes, the images were small and compact, and the film was fundamentally impossible. The AOL service grew along the Web itself and peaked in the early 2000s of more than 25 million subscribers and reduced it before the broader band was approved.
According to US census data in 2022, approximately 175,000 American households are still connected to the Internet via dialing services. These users typically live in rural areas where there is no bandwidth infrastructure or is very expensive.
For these users, other options are limited. The satellite internet is now divided between 2 and 3 million US subscribers between different services and offers too much speed than dialing but often with higher data hats and delays. Traditional broadband serves the vast majority of US Internet users through DSL, cable or fiber connections, but requires infrastructure investments that do not always feel economic in low population areas.
Continuing dialing highlights continuous digital gaps in the United States. While urban users enjoy Gigabit fiber connections, some rural residents still rely on the same technology that provides 1995 Internet. Even basic tasks such as loading a modern web page-assuming bandwidth speed is designed-it can take a few minutes or sometimes don’t work.
The gap between dial connections and modern internet is amazing. A conventional dial connection delivers 0.056 MB / s, while today’s average fiber connection provides 500 Mbps-almost 9,000 times faster. For this landscape, loading a high -resolution photo that is immediately loaded in the broad band takes a few minutes to dial. A film that airs in Netflix in real -time requires loading days. But for the millions of Americans who lived in the dialing period, this statistics only tells part of the story.
Early Internet sound
For those who came before the broadband online, dial-up means a specific ritual: clicking the dial button, hear your modem, dial the local access number, then listen to a distinctive handmade sequence-a static cocoa, beep and horn that indicates your computer is negotiating with AOL servers. After connecting, users paid by the clock or through monthly applications that provided limited watches.
The technology worked by converting digital data into audio signals traveling through standard telephone lines, originally designed for voice calls in the 19th century. This meant that users were unable to get a phone call online and lead to countless family differences on the Internet. The fastest consumer modems were ideal at 56 kbps.
