In case you are outdated sufficient to recollect the signature pinging, boinging, and hissing sounds that got here with connecting to the Web within the early days, maintain onto these recollections — AOL simply introduced that its dial-up is about to hold up ceaselessly.
The corporate launched an announcement on Friday, which learn: “AOL routinely evaluates its services and products and has determined to discontinue Dial-up Web.”
The service and all related software program will cease engaged on September 30, 2025, the corporate added.
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Wait, AOL dial-up service has been accessible all this time? That is a legitimate query, and the reply is shockingly sure. The New York Instances, citing U.S. Census Bureau knowledge, studies that in 2023, 163,000 United States households relied on dial-up service to entry the web. That represents simply over 1 p.c of all web subscribers within the nation.
The final time AOL launched dial-up person numbers was in 2015, when the corporate reported two million customers that represented $40 million a month in income. The corporate didn’t provide present person numbers with its closing announcement.
AOL’s dial-up service unlocked web entry for tens of millions of customers within the Nineteen Nineties, and its signature “You’ve got Bought Mail” sign-on announcement was so iconic that it spurred a rom-com of the identical title starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as a pair who fall in love over on the spot messaging.
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Whereas the closure is bound to encourage a wave of nostalgic thinkpieces a few happier time of the web’s existence, Gen Xers ought to do not forget that the net might need appeared nicer than what now we have in the present day, nevertheless it was insanely slower. Dial-up web speeds common about 56 kilobytes a second, studies The Instances. Typical broadband connections are a number of thousand instances sooner. Take into consideration that the following time you are annoyed that an online web page took greater than half a second to load.
Finish of an Period…
Dial Up Web will likely be discontinued by AOL on September 30, 2025 pic.twitter.com/MXn5t4MzJv
— ? Bodily Media Ceaselessly ? (@VHSDVDBLURAY4K) August 9, 2025
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In case you are outdated sufficient to recollect the signature pinging, boinging, and hissing sounds that got here with connecting to the Web within the early days, maintain onto these recollections — AOL simply introduced that its dial-up is about to hold up ceaselessly.
The corporate launched an announcement on Friday, which learn: “AOL routinely evaluates its services and products and has determined to discontinue Dial-up Web.”
The service and all related software program will cease engaged on September 30, 2025, the corporate added.
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