this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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AOL announces September shutdown for dial-up Internet access (arstechnica.com)
submitted 4 days ago by janus2@lemmy.zip to c/technology@lemmy.world
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After decades of connecting Americans to its online service and the Internet through telephone lines, AOL recently announced it is finally shutting down its dial-up modem service on September 30, 2025. The 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.

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[โ€“] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think the biggest surprise for me is that there's still anywhere in the country with genuine actual POTS lines. I thought the Plain Old Telephone Service was dead and that those places that still had phone numbers were six feet of phone line to a VoIP converter box to an internet connection.

Just before my mother retired as a school secretary, she was telling me all the hell they had to go through to keep a fax machine running in the age of IP telephony.

[โ€“] nucleative@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Wire is pretty much never removed once it's laid out and I'm sure a lot of DSL based internet connections still run over same twisted pair that would have carried POTS lines.

But you're probably right that there's a VoIP device keeping these up and working, maybe just more than 6 ft away and instead in some Telco box down the street.

I think POTS installations will remain for decades more in niche cases - emergency backups in elevators, security systems, hospitals, fire departments. And evidently Grandma's AOL internet connection up until this month haha