{"id":105246,"date":"2025-08-31T16:56:31","date_gmt":"2025-08-31T16:56:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/105246\/"},"modified":"2025-08-31T16:56:31","modified_gmt":"2025-08-31T16:56:31","slug":"does-aol-ditching-dial-up-kill-dial-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/105246\/","title":{"rendered":"Does AOL Ditching Dial-Up Kill Dial-Up?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today in Tedium: I\u2019m going to be straight up. The last time I had to use a dial-up modem came sometime around 2001, just before I headed to the dorms after transferring to the college I graduated from. Within just a few years, dial-up had exited my life, never to return. It\u2019s to the point where I haven\u2019t even had a telephone line in my house pretty much my entire adult life. But I still feel a strong tinge of sadness to know that AOL is finally retiring<\/a> the ol\u2019 hobbyhorse, a fact that I appear to have revealed<\/a> to a lot of people<\/a> on Friday night. At the end of September, it\u2019s gone, which is almost on-the-nose fitting<\/a>. In honor of this news, today\u2019s Tedium is going to talk about modems, AOL, and why legacy technology fades away rather than burns out. \u2014 Ernie @ Tedium\"AOL_floppy.jpg\"\/AOL figured out a way to deliver drink coasters to a thirsty nation. (Al Pavangkanan\/Flickr<\/a>)The basics: Why AOL is ditching dial-up now, rather than 15 years ago<\/p>\n

I should preface this by saying that I have covered the basic topic of dial-up internet so many times that I could probably create a book about the history of the modem just from old issues of Tedium.<\/p>\n

Long story short, it\u2019s no surprise that dial-up has been on the downswing for close to a quarter-century. Despite not having needed a dial-up modem myself since the summer of 2001, I was so passionate about dial-up that I begged to get one for my 13th birthday. Modems are hard to shake, and not just because we remember waiting so long for them to do their thing.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve learned through all this past coverage, the telephone modem was ultimately a hack, pushed through partly by Deaf users who worked around the phone industry\u2019s monopolistic regulations, inventing technologies like the acoustic coupler along the way.<\/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

As noted above, 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, albeit done manually, where information was input by a person and translated into electric pulses, where another person would receive the result.<\/p>\n

Modems work the same way, except no additional people are needed on the other end.<\/p>\n

(You can scold me for that 61-word sentence on your own time.)<\/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 an entirely different medium 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.)<\/p>\n

Telephone lines were a hugely inefficient system for data because they were built for voice. Voice is easy to compress\u2014and is done so heavily, especially on cell phones\u2014but compressing audio means giving up data. That\u2019s not such a good thing when your goal is to share data on the line.<\/p>\n

Plus, there was the problem of line access. With a call, you could generally only take up one line at a time, and 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 ISP level, while having multiple lines, this setup got very complex, very fast.<\/p>\n

The phone industry knew this, but their initial solution, ISDN<\/a>, did not take off among mainstream consumers. (A later one, DSL, had better uptake, and is likely one of the few options rural users currently have.)<\/p>\n

So the industry moved to other solutions to get consumers internet\u2014coaxial cable, 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 wasn\u2019t technically a utility in the way electricity or water were. (Fortunately, there were satellites<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

In recent years, many attempts have been made to classify internet access as a public utility, though the most recent one was struck down by an appeals court<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n

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 the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, were put into effect. So too did electricity, with a whole freaking law, the Rural Electrification Act<\/a>, being necessary to expand its reach.<\/p>\n

\"telephone_poles.jpg\"\/You think the telephone company is gonna wanna get up on all those telephone poles again just so you can have faster internet? The internet isn\u2019t a public utility! You want fast speeds, move somewhere else. (mtneer_man\/Flickr<\/a>)<\/p>\n

But the reach of broadband 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, often stop investing because of the high costs. (Though, to Google\u2019s credit, they started expanding again<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

The result of all this is that, in some areas of the U.S., dial-up remains the best option, the 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 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, and it long ago transitioned into a Web-first property. Oh, it still has those subscriptions, but they\u2019re effectively fancy analogues for security software that your grandparents don\u2019t need. And their email client, while having been defeated by the likes of Gmail years ago, still has its fans. (Side note: At what point do Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail merge, beyond just their backends<\/a>? It\u2019s gotta be something they\u2019re talking about, right?)<\/p>\n

When I posted the AOL news, I would say 90% of the responses were jokes or genuine notes of respect. But there was a small contingent, maybe 5%, 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. But I do think that the fact that AOL represented the weak leg propping up online access in far-flung areas suggests that we have not done our job when it comes to rural internet.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not AOL\u2019s fault. But AOL is the face of this failing.<\/p>\n

$179.95<\/p>\n

The annual cost of MSN Dial-Up Internet Access<\/a>, which will be one of the primary existing dial-up options in the U.S. after AOL disconnects its service. (If you want to pay monthly, that\u2019s $21.95 per month, somehow cheaper than the still-active Juno and NetZero.) For most people off the grid of the accessible internet, the best option is likely a satellite option. In that case, the older HughesNet (which no longer relies<\/a> on dial-up for uploads, but feels like it) and the rich-guy-affiliated Starlink (which is quite a bit faster) likely remain the best options.<\/p>\n

\"AOL_geoworks.png\"\/The DOS AOL client that was distributed with GeoWorks 2.01. I did a lot of yak-shaving<\/a> to get this screenshot.Five interesting, random facts about AOL that you didn\u2019t knowIt is still possible to use the vintage AOL clients. A few years back, a project called Re-AOL, now known as Project P3OL<\/a>, successfully reverse-engineered the AOL network, making it possible for people to chat with other folks using AOL software. As I was working on this piece, I got an AOL 3.0 client working in WINE and was able to log in following the project\u2019s directions. Nerdiest thing on the entire internet, I tell you what.Those disks were very expensive. Per a 2010 piece on TechCrunch<\/a>, an outlet later acquired by AOL, then divested by its parent Yahoo, the company spent $300 million on CDs. \u201cAt one point, 50% of the CDs produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it,\u201d said former AOL chief marketing officer Jan Brandt. Apparently the cost was worth it\u2014Steve Case estimated that it cost about $35 to acquire every new customer, which meant they paid for themselves in short order.AOL also owns CompuServe. The company acquired the legacy network, once the big player itself, in 1997, but the arrangement was a bit weird: Technically, WorldCom bought CompuServe from H&R Block, then immediately sold the information services part of CompuServe to AOL. WorldCom kept the network resources part of CompuServe, and AOL sold its own Advanced Network Services<\/a> portion to WorldCom. CompuServe<\/a> is technically online today (having itself outlasted WorldCom, which fell prey to an accounting scandal), but it\u2019s kind of a plain portal that\u2019s barely used.AOL didn\u2019t start on Windows. The first PC-based client called America Online actually appeared on GeoWorks<\/a>, a graphical operating system I personally have an affinity for (and obsessively started using immediately after I wrote this line). For sake of testing, I was able to get the AOL client to load in PC\/GEOS (the FOSS continuation of GeoWorks) after doing some hacky copying and pasting of files. However, it has no TCP\/IP support, so connecting it to Project P3OL is out of the question.Volunteers drove the network\u2019s moderation. Like Reddit, AOL would have failed<\/a> if it didn\u2019t have its mods. The company leaned on thousands of volunteers, many paid with free hours, to maintain the network\u2019s many communities. Eventually, the plan fell apart when the moderators realized they were working for free.\u201cEver heard the joke about big fish eating smaller fish? Ultimately it ends up with the biggest fish in some hapless state of disarray, being pecked at by the tiniest fish of all \u2026 That seems to be happening to AOL. They proudly issue press releases trumpeting their 16 million subscribers, but apparently can’t retain control of their own chat rooms.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 A passage from the website AOL Watch, a cybersecurity watchdog and critic of AOL that somehow remains online in 2025. One page of the website, dating to 1998, shows many examples<\/a> of chat rooms getting hacked, a situation Wired even covered back in the day. Ever wonder why AOL\u2019s walled garden eventually disappeared? This might be one reason why.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t need a white noise machine<\/a>, you have this video.<\/p>\n

Think of AOL dropping dial-up as 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

(And 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

This 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, like FTP<\/a>, this already niche use case is going to get more niche.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 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

If you go to an auto-body repair shop and see your invoice getting printed out on a tractor-feed dot-matrix printer, you know that you\u2019re getting an invoice, and not someone\u2019s MapQuest<\/a> directions. Sometimes, things just stay put because it makes sense for them to stay put. The nice thing about having a very old computer doing a task that any other computer can do better is that you know exactly what it is being used for.<\/p>\n

\"336modem.jpg\"\/U.S. Robotics had the best looking modems. I think we can all agree with that, now that they\u2019ve been obsolete for more than two decades, right? Side note: They\u2019re still online<\/a>. (Jphill19\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a>)<\/p>\n

So there is life in dial-up. But AOL? It is essentially a giant advertising business that sells subscriptions, and those subscriptions are about to lose their most important legacy feature.<\/p>\n

But while dial-up may have been AOL\u2019s primary business earlier in its life, it hasn\u2019t really been its focus in quite a long time. AOL is a highly diversified company, whose primary focus over the past 15 years has been advertising.<\/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 bringing your laptop.<\/p>\n

AOL is simply too weak to support this next generation 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, like Microsoft\u2019s Airband Initiative<\/a>, which relies on distributing broadband over unused \u201cwhite spaces\u201d on the television dial, stand a better shot. It\u2019s likely that 5G connectivity will improve over time (T-Mobile already promotes it<\/a> as a rural option), and perhaps someone not named Elon Musk will offer an alternative to Starlink eventually.<\/p>\n

Technologies don\u2019t die. They just slowly become so irrelevant that they might as well be dead.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, this little newsletter gets suspiciously close to breaking news, and on Friday night, when Matt Lee shared a link highlighting AOL\u2019s plan to kill dial-up, I hadn\u2019t realized how relatively unknown the news was when I posted it.<\/p>\n

(Tedium isn\u2019t really built for situations like these. Maybe it needs to be.)<\/p>\n

It turned out that Matt was very early\u2014which meant that I was, too. The result of this was that 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 it.<\/p>\n

The story of Vincent Ferrari, who publicly exposed<\/a> AOL\u2019s terrible customer service, is so good that I can look past the fact that Matt Lauer interviewed him.<\/p>\n

That is not the case with most online experiences, which are usually very diverse and 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.<\/p>\n

We all have our different variations on it, but they usually started with a modem connecting to a phone number and dropping us into a single familiar place.<\/p>\n

I think the reason that AOL, for all the hell it got back in the day, sticks with people is very simply a reflection of the fact that it was the first online experience for so many people. That saga, for so many of us, started a particular way.<\/p>\n

We have lost a lot of ISPs over the years. Few spark the passion and memories of America Online, a network that somehow beat out more innovative and more established players to become the onramp to the Information Superhighway, for all the good and bad that represents.<\/p>\n

AOL must be embarrassed of that history. It barely even announced its closure.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal<\/a>! Maybe next time AOL decides to discontinue dial-up, I can make it a breaking news story.<\/p>\n

Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that HughesNet still relied on dial-up. This is not true. (Still sucks, though.) Also, a quick clarification: Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail do share infrastructure, though my passing reference was about merging the clients. We regret the errors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today in Tedium: I\u2019m going to be straight up. The last time I had to use a dial-up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":105247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[1638,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-105246","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-internet","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}