AOL Will Shut Down Dial-Up Internet Access in September

After decades of connecting US subscribers to its online service and the internet through telephone lines, AOL recently announced it is finally shutting down its dial-up modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marks the end of a technology that served as the primary gateway to the web for millions of users throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

AOL confirmed the shutdown date in a help message to customers: "AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans."

Along with the dial-up service, AOL announced it will retire its AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser on the same date. The dialer software managed the connection process between computers and AOL's network, while Shield was a web browser optimized for slower connections and older operating systems.

AOL's dial-up service launched as "America Online" in 1991 as a closed commercial online service, with dial-up roots extending back to Quantum Link for Commodore computers in 1985. However, AOL didn't provide actual internet access yet: The ability to browse the web, access newsgroups, or use services like gopher launched in 1994. Before then, AOL users could only access content hosted on AOL's own servers.

When AOL finally opened its gates to the internet in 1994, websites were measured in kilobytes, images were small and compressed, and video was essentially impossible. The AOL service grew alongside the web itself, peaking at over 25 million subscribers in the early 2000s before broadband adoption accelerated its decline.

According to 2022 US Census data, approximately 175,000 American households still connect to the internet through dial-up services. These users typically live in rural areas where broadband infrastructure doesn't exist or remains prohibitively expensive to install.

For these users, the alternatives are limited. Satellite internet now serves between 2 million and 3 million US subscribers split between various services, offering speeds far exceeding dial-up but often with data caps and higher latency. Traditional broadband through DSL, cable, or fiber-optic connections serves the vast majority of US internet users but requires infrastructure investments that don't always make economic sense in sparsely populated areas.

The persistence of dial-up highlights the ongoing digital divide in the United States. While urban users enjoy gigabit fiber connections, some rural residents still rely on the same technology that powered the internet of 1995. Even basic tasks like loading a modern webpage—designed with the assumption of broadband speeds—can take minutes over a dial-up connection, or sometimes it doesn't work at all.

The gap between dial-up and modern internet connections is staggering. A typical dial-up connection delivered 0.056 megabits per second, while today's average fiber connection provides 500 Mbps—nearly 9,000 times faster. To put this in perspective, downloading a single high-resolution photo that loads instantly on broadband would take several minutes on dial-up. A movie that streams in real time on Netflix would require days of downloading. But for millions of Americans who lived through the dial-up era, these statistics tell only part of the story.

For those who came online before broadband, dial-up meant a specific ritual: clicking the dial button, hearing your modem dial a local access number, then listening to the distinctive handshake sequence—a cacophony of static, beeps, and hissing that indicated your computer was negotiating a connection with AOL's servers. Once connected, users paid by the hour or through monthly plans that offered limited hours of access.

The technology worked by converting digital data into audio signals that traveled over standard telephone lines, originally designed in the 19th century for voice calls. This meant users couldn't receive phone calls while online, leading to countless family disputes over internet time. The fastest consumer modems topped out at 56 kilobits per second under ideal conditions.

AOL didn't invent dial-up internet access, but the company perfected the art of making it accessible to non-technical users. Where competitors required users to understand concepts like PPP settings and TCP/IP configurations, AOL provided a single software package that handled everything. Users just needed to insert one of the billions of CD-ROMs the company mailed out, install the software, and click “Connect.”

The company's cultural impact extended far beyond mere connectivity. AOL Instant Messenger introduced many users to real-time digital communication. Chat rooms created some of the internet's first social networks. The famous “You've got mail” notification became so iconic that it was used as the title for a 1998 romantic comedy. For better or worse, AOL keywords trained a generation to navigate the web through corporate-curated portals rather than open searching.

Over the years, Ars Technica documented numerous dial-up developments and disasters that plagued AOL users. In 2015, 83-year-old Ron Dorff received phone bills totaling $24,298.93 after his AOL modem started dialing a long-distance number instead of a local access point—a problem that had plagued users since at least 2002, when New York's attorney general received more than 50 complaints about similar billing disasters.

The financial risks weren't limited to technical mishaps: AOL itself contributed to user frustration by repeatedly adjusting its pricing strategy. In 2006, the company raised dial-up rates to $25.90 per month—the same price as broadband—in an attempt to push users toward faster connections. This followed years of subscriber losses that saw AOL's user base fall over time as the company struggled with conflicting strategies, like launching a $10 Netscape-branded service in 2003 while maintaining premium pricing for its main offering.

AOL's shutdown doesn't mean dial-up is completely dead. Several niche providers like NetZero, Juno, and Dialup 4 Less continue to offer dial-up services, particularly in areas where it remains the only option. In the past, some maintained dial-up connections as a backup connection for emergencies, though many still use it for specific tasks that don't require high bandwidth, like processing credit card payments.

The Public Switched Telephone Network that carries dial-up signals still exists, though telephone companies increasingly route calls through modern packet-switched networks rather than traditional circuit-switched systems. As long as traditional phone service exists, dial-up remains technically possible—just increasingly impractical as the web grows more demanding.

For AOL, maintaining dial-up service likely became more about serving a dwindling but dependent user base than generating meaningful revenue. The infrastructure requirements, customer support needs, and technical maintenance for such a legacy system eventually outweigh the benefits.

The September 30 shutdown date gives remaining dial-up users just over one month now to find alternative internet access—a challenge for those in areas where alternatives don't exist. Some may switch to satellite or cellular services despite higher costs. Others may lose internet access entirely, further widening the digital divide that dial-up, for all its limitations, helped bridge for three decades.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.