In news that will evoke nostalgia for a lot of people, AOL announced that it will be discontinuing dial-up Internet access on September 30. AOL was the poster child of the dial-up Internet era when dial-up was the primary way to get online before the advent of DSL and cable modems in the late 1990s. Anybody who used dial-up can still remember the pings and pongs while the phone made a connection to a dial-up server. People probably remember when AOL would mass-mail diskettes that contained AOL software to attract new customers.

AOL was phenomenally successful in the 1990s. AOL ruled the dial-up industry and reached 34 million dial-up customers at its peak. The company had a lot of ISP competitors like Sprint, EarthLink, NetZero, Prodigy, and a ton of small dial-up ISPs operating in local markets.

But AOL was much more than just a dial-up portal to reach the early web. AOL created the first major platform that included email, news, games, shopping, and a host of other services in one place. AOL was attractive to new users since it gave them the ability to do things without having to search the web. Before platforms like AOL, a user had to be fairly tech-savvy to use the Internet. A lot of users went onto the AOL platform and never strayed elsewhere on the web. Its closest early platform competitor was CompuServe, which grew to about 3 million subscribers and eventually concentrated on serving business people. MSN and other websites eventually tried to duplicate and  compete with AOL.

People remember speeds on AOL and other dial-up ISPs of 56 kbps (kilobits per second). But 56 kbps was only introduced in 1997, and before that, most ISP modems offered speeds of 28.8 kbps or 33.6 kbps. The first DSL modems that brought 1 Mbps speeds that were 18 times faster than dial-up.

AOL stunned the business world on January 10, 2000, when it announced that it would buy Time Warner for $182 billion in stock and debt, the largest corporate merger ever. The purchase was at the height of the early Internet craze, and it was unbelievable that AOL could acquire the company that owned Time Magazine, CNN, and the Warner Brothers studios. AOL wanted access to the Time Warner content as a way to stave off looming competition from other web companies. It’s hard to know if the envisioned synergies could have thrived because in the spring of 2001, the dot-com crash killed AOL’s stock valuation along with other Internet and telco stocks.

AOL and other dial-up ISPs were a major issue for telephone companies because users would stay on dial-up connections for hours or days. Voice switches were not designed to have lines tied up for that long, and telephone companies complained of reaching switch saturation at busy times. A number of telcos tried to block or limit dial-up ISPs, but the courts and the FCC ruled that dial-up was a legitimate use of telephone lines.

You might wonder who still uses dial-up. According to the U.S Census, there were still 175,000 households on dial-up in 2020. The attraction of dial-up is that it is cheap – between $10 and $20 per month for the remaining companies in the business. It’s an attractive option for folks who only want to read email, or for rural folks with no other affordable alternative. Folks who still want dial-up will still have a few other options left, like EarthLink and NetZero.

I used AOL email for many years as my personal email. AOL says that its email service will remain after dial-up dies, but you have to wonder how long they’ll keep that going. Hearing the announcement brought back memories of hearing the AOL pings and the “You’ve Got Mail” greeting, and of using other long-dead services like Netscape and Ask Jeeves.