The fact that AOL\u2019s dial-up is still active in the first place highlights a truism of technology: Sometimes, the important stuff sticks around well after it\u2019s obsolete.<\/p>\n
Why AOL is ditching dial-up now<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no surprise that dial-up has lingered for close to a quarter-century. Despite not having needed a dial-up modem myself since the summer of 2001, I was once so passionate about dial-up that I begged to get a modem for my 13th birthday. Modems<\/a> are hard to shake, and not just because we fondly remember waiting so long for them to do their thing.<\/p>\n Originally, the telephone modem was a hack. It was pushed into public consciousness<\/a> partly by Deaf users<\/a> who worked around the phone industry\u2019s monopolistic regulations to develop the teletypewriter<\/a>, a system to communicate over phone lines via text. Along the way, the community invented technologies like the acoustic coupler.<\/p>\n To make that hack function, modems had to do multiple conversions in real time\u2014from data to audio and back again, in two directions. As I put it in a piece that compared the modem to the telegraph<\/a>:<\/p>\n The modem, at least in its telephone-based forms, represents a dance between sound and data. By translating information into an aural signal, then into current, then back into an aural signal, then back into data once again, the modulation and demodulation going on is very similar to the process used with the original telegraph<\/a>, albeit done manually.<\/p>\n With telegraphs, the information was input by a person, translated into electric pulses, and received by another person. Modems work the same way, just without human translators. <\/p>\n The result of all this back and forth was that modems had to give up a hell of a lot of speed to make this all work. The need to connect over a medium built for audio meant that data was at risk of getting lost over the line. (This is why error correction<\/a> was an essential part of the modem\u2019s evolution; often data needed to be shared more than once to ensure it got through. Without error correction<\/a>, dial-up modems would be even slower.)<\/p>\n Remember that sound? It marked many users\u2019 first experience getting online.AdventuresinHD\/YouTube<\/a><\/p>\n Telephone lines were a hugely inefficient system for data because they were built for voice and heavily compressed audio. Voices are still clear and recognizable after being compressed, but audio compression can wreak havoc on data connections. <\/p>\n Plus, there was the problem of line access. With a call, you could not easily share a connection. That meant you couldn\u2019t make phone calls while using dial-up, leading to some homes getting a second line. And at the Internet Service Provider level, having multiple lines got very complex, very fast.<\/p>\n The phone industry knew this, but its initial solution, ISDN<\/a>, did not take off among mainstream consumers. (A later one, DSL<\/a>, had better uptake, and is likely one of the few Internet options rural users currently have.)<\/p>\n In some areas of the United States<\/a>, dial-up remains the best option\u2014the result of decades of poor investment in Internet infrastructure.<\/p>\n So the industry moved to other solutions to get consumers Internet\u2014coaxial cable<\/a>, which was already widespread because of cable TV, and fiber, which wasn\u2019t. The problem is, coax never reached quite as far as telephone wires did, in part because cable television<\/a> wasn\u2019t technically a utility in the way electricity or water were. <\/p>\n In recent years, many attempts have been made to classify Internet access as a public utility<\/a>, though the most recent one was struck down by an appeals court<\/a> earlier this year. The public utility regulation is important. The telephone had struggled to reach rural communities in the 1930s, and only did so after a series of regulations, including one that led to the creation<\/a> of the Federal Communications Commission, were put into effect. So too did electricity, which needed a dedicated law<\/a> to expand its reach.<\/p>\n But the reach of broadband<\/a> is frustratingly incomplete, as highlighted by the fact that many areas of the country are not properly covered by cellular signals. And getting new wires hung can be an immensely difficult task, in part because companies that sell fiber, like Verizon<\/a> and Google<\/a>, often stop investing due to the high costs. (Though, to Google\u2019s credit, it started expanding again in 2022<\/a> after a six-year rollback.)<\/p>\n So, in some areas of the United States, dial-up remains the best option\u2014the result of decades of poor investment in Internet infrastructure. This, for years, has propped up companies like AOL, which has evolved numerous times since it foolishly merged with Time Warner<\/a> a quarter-century ago.<\/p>\n But AOL is not the company it was. After multiple acquisitions and spin-outs, it is now a mere subsidiary of Yahoo<\/a>, and it long ago transitioned into a Web-first property. Oh, it still has subscriptions<\/a>, but they\u2019re effectively fancy analogues for unnecessary security software. And their email client, while having been defeated by the likes of Gmail<\/a> years ago, still has its fans. <\/p>\n When I posted the AOL news on social media<\/a>, about 90 percent of the responses were jokes or genuine notes of respect. But there was a small contingent, maybe 5 percent, that talked about how much this was going to screw over far-flung communities. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s AOL\u2019s responsibility to keep this model going forever.<\/p>\n Instead, it looks like the job is going to fall to two companies: Microsoft<\/a>, whose MSN Dial-Up Internet Access<\/a> costs US $179.95 per year, and the company United Online<\/a>, which still operates the longtime dial-up players Juno and NetZero. Satellite Internet<\/a> is also an option, with older services like HughesNet and newer ones like Starlink<\/a> picking up the slack.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not AOL\u2019s fault. But AOL is the face of this failing.<\/p>\n AOL dropping dial-up is part of a long fade-out<\/p>\n As technologies go, the dial-up modem has not lasted quite as long as the telegram, which has been active in one form or another for 181 years. But the modem, which was first used in 1958 as part of an air-defense system<\/a>, has stuck around for a good 67 years. That makes it one of the oldest pieces of computer-related technology still in modern use.<\/p>\n To give you an idea of how old that is: 1958 is also the year that the integrated circuit<\/a>, an essential building block of any modern computer, was invented. The disk platter, which became the modern hard drive<\/a>, was invented a year earlier. The floppy disk<\/a> came a decade later.<\/p>\n (It should be noted that the modem itself is not dying\u2014your smartphone has one\u2014but the connection your landline has to your modem, the really loud one, has seen better days.)<\/p>\n The news that AOL is dropping its service might be seen as the end of the line for dial-up, but the story of the telegram hints that this may not be the case. In 2006, much hay was made about Western Union sending its final telegram<\/a>. But Western Union was never the only company sending telegrams, and another company picked up the business. You can still send a telegram via International Telegram<\/a> in 2025. (It\u2019s not cheap: A single message, sent the same day, is $34, plus 75 cents per word.)<\/p>\n In many ways, AOL dropping the service is a sign that this already niche use case is going to get more niche. But niche use cases have a way of staying relevant, given the right audience. It\u2019s sort of like why doctors continue to use pagers. As a Planet Money episode<\/a> from two years ago noted, the additional friction of using pagers worked well with the way doctors functioned, because it ensured that they knew the messages they were getting didn\u2019t compete with anything else.<\/p>\n Dial-up is likely never going to totally die, unless the landline phone system itself gets knocked offline, which AT&T has admittedly been itching to do<\/a>. It remains one of the cheapest options to get online, outside of drinking a single coffee at a Panera and logging onto the wifi.<\/p>\n But AOL? While dial-up may have been the company\u2019s primary business earlier in its life, it hasn\u2019t really been its focus in quite a long time. AOL is now a highly diversified company, whose primary focus over the past 15 years has been advertising. It still sells subscriptions, but those subscriptions are about to lose their most important legacy feature.<\/p>\n AOL is simply too weak to support the next generation of Internet service themselves. Their inroad to broadband was supposed to be Time Warner Cable; that didn\u2019t work out, so they pivoted to something else, but kept around the legacy business while it was still profitable. It\u2019s likely that emerging technologies<\/a>, like Microsoft\u2019s Airband Initiative<\/a>, which relies on distributing broadband over unused \u201cwhite spaces\u201d on the television dial, stand a better shot. 5G<\/a> connectivity will also likely improve over time (T-Mobile<\/a> already promotes its 5G home Internet<\/a> as a rural option), and perhaps more satellite-based options will emerge.<\/p>\n Technologies don\u2019t die. They just slowly become so irrelevant that they might as well be dead.<\/p>\n The monoculture of the AOL login experience<\/p>\n When I posted the announcement, hidden in an obscure link on the AOL website sent to me by a colleague, it immediately went viral on Bluesky and Mastodon<\/a>.<\/p>\n That meant I got to see a lot of people react to this news in real time. Most had the same comment: I didn\u2019t even know it was still around. Others made modem jokes, or talked about AOL\u2019s famously terrible customer service<\/a>. What was interesting was that most people said roughly the same thing about the service.<\/p>\n That is not the case with most online experiences, which usually reflect myriad points of views. I think it speaks to the fact that while the Internet was the ultimate monoculture killer, the experience of getting online for the first time was largely monocultural. Usually, it started with a modem connecting to a phone number and dropping us into a single familiar place. <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/a-retro-rectangular-modem-that-says-u-s-robotics-sportster-33-6-faxmoden.jpg?id=61508670&width=980\")
![\"A](\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/media-library\/a-screenshot-showing-a-1994-dos-aol-client.jpg?id=61508672&width=980\")