Today's Edition
(NEW YORK TIMES)
AOL has announced that its dial-up internet service will finally be discontinued next month.
The service, seen by many as a relic of the early days of the internet, will be discontinued on September 30 along with its associated software, the company said.
AOL made the announcement quietly via a statement on its help portal Friday:
"AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue dial-up internet.”
In 2023, according to data from the US Census Bureau, an estimated 163,000 households in the United States were using only dial-up for internet service - representing just over 1% of the nation’s household internet subscriptions.
In the 1990s, AOL’s dial-up tone was ubiquitous across households. And in 2000, America Online, as the company was known then, was the world’s largest internet company.
The service joins a growing list of early internet products to be retired in recent years. Microsoft discontinued Skype in May and Internet Explorer in 2022. AOL’s own instant messaging service, AIM, was shut down in 2017.
Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second; modern connections in the United States are, on average, several thousand times faster.
In 2015, AOL’s dial-up service had more than 2 million users, bringing in more than $40 million in revenue a month. AOL, which is owned by Yahoo, did not release information about how many people use its dial-up service now.
