Back in the final years of the last century, I first logged onto the Internet on a flatmate’s computer with a 14.4 baud modem connecting to AOL. That chirpy tune of the modem lasted for many years but then broadband came along and that changed the internet as higher bandwidth meant more images, eventually video, and more sophisticated web services.
So it’s a bit of a surprise to hear that AOL, after 34 years, are to switch off their dial up service in the US and Canada. It’s not so much the surprise that AOL have been running dial up modem connections for so long, it’s more of a what the heck are the people on dial up doing?
Even with the fastest dial up modem, you wouldn’t get more than a 56 kbit/s speed, and that must make websites frustrating slow to load at best, but more likely totally unuseable. Today even with the flakiest broadband connection you’d expect to get in the region of 2 Mbits/s, but with fibre this could be easily be measured in Gbits/s. To put it in perspective, 1Gbit speed is a million times faster than a kbit.
In the UK, the AOL brand disappeared almost 20 years ago when AOL UK operations were acquired by Carphone Warehouse, the parent company of TalkTalk.
AOL said that it “routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 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“.
