After decades of By connecting American subscribers to its online and internet service via telephone lines, AOL recently announced that it finally closed its numbering modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marks the end of a technology that served as the main gateway to the web for millions of users in the 1990s and early 2000s.
AOL has confirmed the date of stopping in a customer assistance message: “AOL regularly assess its products and services and has decided to stop the Internet Dial-up. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans.”
In addition to the Dial-UP service, AOL has announced that it will withdraw its software AOL Dialer and its AOL Shield browser on the same date. The Dialer software has managed the connection process between computers and the AOL network, while Shield was an optimized web browser for slower connections and older operating systems.
The AOL accorded service was launched as “America Online” in 1991 as a closed online sales service, with digital roots extending to a quantum link for commodore computers in 1985. However, AOL has not yet provided real internet access: the possibility of browsing the web, access to press groups, or using services like Gopher launched in 1994. could access that in contentment hosted on the own AOL servers.
When AOL finally opened its doors to the Internet in 1994, the websites were measured in Kilo-Kilo-Great, the images were small and compressed, and the video was essentially impossible. The AOL service developed alongside the web itself, culminating in more than 25 million subscribers in the early 2000s before the adoption of broadband accelerated its decline.
According to data from the American census of 2022, around 175,000 American households still connect to the Internet via numbering services. These users generally live in rural areas where large -band infrastructure does not exist or remains prohibitive to install.
For these users, the alternatives are limited. Internet satellite now serves between 2 million and 3 million American subscribers divided between various services, offering speeds far exceeding dial-up but often with data ceilings and higher latency. Traditional wide -band connections by DSL, cable or fiber optic serves the vast majority of us, Internet users, but require infrastructure investments that do not always have an economical sense in low -populated areas.
The persistence of dial-up highlights the current digital divide in the United States. While urban users appreciate Gigabit fiber connections, some rural residents are still counting on the same technology that has propelled the 1995 Internet. Even basic tasks such as loading a modern web page – designed with the wide -band gear hypothesis – can take a few minutes on a numbering connection, or sometimes it does not work at all.
The gap between Internet Dial-up and Modern connections is amazing. A typical numbering connection delivered 0.056 megabits per second, while the average fiber connection today provides 500 Mbps, or 9,000 times faster. To put this in perspective, the download of a single high resolution photo that instantly takes care of broadband would take several minutes on dial-up. A film that broadcasts in real time on Netflix would require download days. But for millions of Americans who have experienced the era of dialogue, these statistics only tell a part of the story.
The sound of early internet
For those who came online before high speed, Dial -UP meant a specific ritual: click on the numbering button, hear your compound modem a local access number, then listen to the distinctive handshake – a static and whistling cacophony indicating that your computer negotiated a connection with AOL servers. Once connected, users paid on time or through monthly plans that offered limited access hours.
The technology worked by converting digital data into audio signals that have traveled on standard telephone lines, originally designed in the 19th century for voice calls. This meant that users could not receive online telephone calls, which leads to countless family disputes on the Internet. The fastest consumption modems have reached 56 kilobits per second under ideal conditions.
