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Title: AOL Finally Discontinues Its Dial-Up Internet Access - After 34 Years

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/10/0626...

AOL (now a Yahoo subsidiary) just announced its dial-up internet service will
be discontinued at the end of September. "The change also means the
retirement of the AOL Dialer software and the AOL Shield browser, both
designed for older operating systems and slow connections that relied on the
familiar screech of a modem handshake," remembers Slashdot reader
BrianFagioli (noting that dial-up Internet "was once the gateway to the web
for millions of households, back when speeds were measured in kilobits and
waiting for a picture to load could feel like an eternity." AOL's dial-up
service "has been publicly available for 34 years," writes Tom's Hardware.
But AppleInsider notes the move comes more than 40 years after AOL started
"as a very early Apple service." AOL itself started back in 1983 under the
name Control Video Corporation, offering online services for the Atari 2600
console. After failing, it became Quantum Computer Services in 1985,
eventually launching AppleLink in 1988 to connect Macintosh computers
together... With the launch of PC Link for IBM-compatible PCs in 1988 and
parting from Apple in October 1989, the company rebranded itself as America
Online, or AOL... Even at its height, dial-up connections could get up to 56
kilobits per second under ideal conditions, while modern connections are
measured in megabits and gigabits. Most of the service was also what's
considered a "walled garden," with features that were only available through
AOL itself and that it wasn't the actual, untamed Internet. In the 1990s AOL
"was how millions of people were introduced to the Internet," the article
remembers, adding that "Even after the AOL Time Warner acquisition and the
2015 acquisition by Verizon, AOL was still a popular service. Astoundingly,
it counted about two million dial-up subscribers at the time." In the 2021
acquisition of assets from Verizon by Apollo Global Management, AOL was said
to have 1.5 million people paying for services. However, this was more for
technical support and software, rather than for actual Internet access. A
CNBC report at the time reports that the dial-up user count was "in the low
thousands".... While it dies off, not with a bang but a whimper, AOL's dial-
up is still remembered as one of the most transformative services in the
Internet age. "This change does not impact the numerous other valued products
and services that these subscribers are able to access and enjoy as part of
their plans," a Yahoo spokesperson told PC Magazine this week. "There is also
no impact to our users' free AOL email accounts." AOL's disastrous 2001
merger with Time Warner and ongoing inability to deliver broadband to its
customers... left it on a path to decline that acquiring such widely read
sites as Engadget [2005] and TechCrunch [2010] did not stem. By 2014, the
number of dial-up AOL customers had collapsed to 2.34 million. A year later,
Verizon bought the company for $4.4 billion in an internet-content play that
turned out to be as doomed as the Time Warner transaction. In 2021, Verizon
unloaded both AOL and Yahoo, which it had separately purchased in 2017, to
the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management.... The demise of AOL's dial-
up service does not mean the extinction of the oldest form of consumer online
access. Estimates from the Census Bureau's 2023 American Community Survey
show 163,401 Americans connected to the internet via dial-up that year. That
was by far the smallest segment of the internet-using population, dwarfed by
100,166,949 subscribing to such forms of broadband as "cable, fiber optic, or
DSL"; 8,628,648 using satellite; 3,318,901 using "Internet access without a
subscription" (which suggests Wi-Fi from coffee shops or public libraries);
and 1,445,135 via "other service." The remaining AOL dial-up subscribers will
need to find some sort of replacement, which in rural areas may be limited to
fixed wireless or SpaceX's considerably more expensive Starlink. Or they may
wind up joining the ranks of Americans with no internet access: 6,866,059, in
those 2023 estimates.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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