Decades later AOL connects U.S. subscribers to its online services and the internet, and recently announced that it will eventually shut down its dial-up modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marked the end of a technology that was the primary gateway to the network, which was the millions of users throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
AOL confirmed the closing date in a help message to the customer: “AOL will typically evaluate its products and services and decide to stop dial-up internet. The service will no longer be available for use in the AOL program.”
In addition to the dialing service, AOL announced that it will retire its AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser on the same date. The dialer software manages the connection process between the computer and the AOL network, while SHIELD is 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 browser 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 the door to the Internet in 1994, it measured the website in kilobytes, and the images were small and compressed, and video was essentially impossible. AOL services grew along with the Web itself, reaching a peak of more than 25 million subscribers in the early 2000s, and broadband adoption accelerated its decline.
According to the 2022 U.S. Census data, about 175,000 U.S. households are still connected to the internet via dial-up services. These users usually live in rural areas where spacious broadband infrastructure does not exist or is installed.
For these users, alternatives are limited. Now, satellite Internet serves subscribers between 2 million and 3 million subscribers, offering speeds far beyond dialing, but usually with data caps and high latency. Traditional broadband connected through DSL, cable or fiber serves the vast majority of our Internet users, but requires infrastructure investments that are not always economically significant in a sparsely populated area.
The durability of dialing highlights the ongoing digital divide in the United States. Although urban users prefer gigabit fiber connections, some rural residents still rely on the technology of the Internet in 1995. Even the basic tasks of loading modern web pages can be used with the assumption design of broadband speed, and can take a few minutes to dial up the connection, sometimes not even working at all.
The gap between dial-up and modern internet connection is shocking. Typical dial-up connections provide 0.056 megabits per second, while today’s average fiber connections offer 500 Mbps, almost 9000 times faster. From a perspective, downloading a high-resolution photo that immediately loads on broadband will take several minutes to dial. How many days does a movie that plays live on Netflix take to download. But for millions of Americans living in the dial-up era, these statistics tell only a part of the story.
The sound of the early Internet
For those who are online before broadband, dialing means a specific ritual: clicking the dial button, listening to the modem dialing local access number, then listening to a unique handshake sequence (static, harsh sequence of beeps) and indicating that your computer is connecting to AOL’s servers. Once connected, users pay by hourly or monthly plan, providing limited access time.
The technology is by converting digital data into an audio signal, originally designed in the 19th century for voice calls. This means that users are unable to answer calls while online, resulting in countless family disputes on the Internet. Under ideal conditions, the fastest consumer modem is at the highest level of 56 thousand rays per second.
