After 34 years of connecting Americans to the Internet via telephone lines, the American company AOL recently announced the termination of its dial-up Internet access service on September 30, 2025, UNN reports with reference to Ars Technica.
Details
This announcement marks the end of a technology that served as the primary gateway to the World Wide Web for millions of users throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
AOL confirmed the shutdown date in a support message to customers: "AOL regularly evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL rate plans."
AOL's dial-up Internet access service was launched under the name "America Online" in 1991, when the Internet consisted primarily of text content, although its roots date back to the Quantum Link service, launched in 1985 for Commodore computers. Over the next few years, with the advent of the World Wide Web, website sizes were measured in kilobytes, images were small and compressed, and video was virtually impossible. The service evolved with the Internet itself, peaking at 20 million users in the early 2000s before the spread of broadband accelerated its decline.
According to 2022 US Census data, approximately 175,000 American households still connect to the Internet via dial-up services. These users typically live in rural areas where broadband infrastructure is absent or its installation remains prohibitively expensive.
For these users, alternatives are limited. Satellite internet now serves about 2-3 million subscribers in the US, distributed among various services, offering speeds significantly higher than dial-up, but often with data caps and higher latency. Traditional broadband access via DSL, cable, or fiber optic connection serves the vast majority of Internet users in the US, but requires infrastructure investments that do not always make economic sense in sparsely populated areas.
The persistence of dial-up highlights the ongoing digital divide in the United States. While urban users enjoy gigabit fiber optic connections, some rural residents still rely on the same technology that powered the Internet in 1995. Even basic tasks, such as loading a modern web page designed for broadband speeds, can take minutes over a dial-up connection, and sometimes it doesn't work at all, the publication notes.
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