Imagine how much it sucks for the person that is using dial up. Like we know they had zero alternatives.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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What year is it?!
TIL AOL Dial up is still a thing.
To be honest, I'm surprised it lasted this long.
I read like 10 years ago that a small but still double digit percentage of their income still came from dial-up subscribers many of whom didn’t still use the service. It was speculated at the time that many of these people simply didn’t realize they were still paying for it. I’m guessing they all finally died or credit card numbers changed enough that it wasn’t free money for them anymore.
Funny thing is dialup has been non viable for ~15 years if not more where I live. When you can get 100 mbit fibre for like $5 a month and it costs a whopping $12.5 dollars a month for a 1000 mbit fibre line, it makes no economic sense to offer dialup.
Where the fuck do you get fiber for $12/month?? Not in the US I assume.
Of course not.
I remember when I first moved to the US and saw the broadband and cell phone prices. Corruption american style.
Don’t visit Canada then. American prices look dirt cheap compared to what we have here.
I've lived in Canada too. I was surprised to find the situation with broadband/cell phone services to be even less competitive (and more pricey) than in the US.
1gigabit is 80+ here yep.
You still didn't answer where ;)
Sorry missed that. This is in Ukraine.
The are large portions on the US where there's dialup or satellite only.
Every rural house gets a phone line, just like they all get roads and mail
It's not profitable, but that didn't matter because it was a utility
With Broadband, it's a "luxury" so to get it out to a clump of rural users, they all need to pay for it, or wait and hope someone else pays to get it closer.
The government gave them $400 Billion dollars (that were paid from our taxes) to do it and they pocketed the money.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5839394
Biden just did it in 2024 again, I think that was "just" 5 billion tho
Pretty sure there was more than just those two
Not anymore. Now the cell phone company just puts up a tower and runs one fiber line to it and everybody has high speed internet or a rich billionaire launches some satellites into space on his rockets.
Laying one fiber line to a cell phone tower is much cheaper than laying a bunch of fiber lines to each individual household.
We may have different standards for "rural areas"....
I did Google for starlink because I'm not up to date on their coverage, and there's still a lot of dead ones up north.
That is possible. I was basing my comment on some information from an FCC report that said that there was no place in the continental United States that was not able to be covered by Starlink.
There was this program called Bead that was going to prioritize places with no internet access whatsoever or dial up for the first people to get funding, and they say they found that there wasn't any, so they had to go for the next thing which was slow internet.
And there's lots of valid reasons to not want starlink. So it really doesn't matter if that's the only option.
But...
The American taxpayers have paid telecom companies billions of dollars on at least two separate occasions years apart to roll out broadband to everyone. But they just keep taking money and not doing it, and then a decade later lobby for the money again.
Yeah, you do make a good point there. I've seen that happen. Where a company takes money and doesnt do it. Those companies should be made to repay the money with interest for not doing what they said they would. But I've also seen companies that actually do the job and get high-speed internet out to those who wouldn't have otherwise had it. So I think it really just depends on the company.
The two companies I'm thinking of right off the top of my head are AT&T and T-Mobile. AT&T took money to roll out broadband and never did so, and T-Mobile merged with Sprint, and said they would roll out high-speed broadband to very rural areas, and actually did do it, and I ended up benefiting from T-Mobile's home internet rollout.
I lived in a pretty rural area for a while that had 10 MBPS wired internet or satellite and then T-Mobile came around and with their home internet you could get 70 MBPS so that was a no-brainer
That’s like Netflix discontinuing their dvd service only a few years ago
Meanwhile, MSN Dial-Up still exists for some reason, you could say it's the COBOL of Microsoft.
AOL was founded in 1983 and dial-up would have been the only way to access it. These dates are suspect.
Per your own link: they started as game delivery service called Control Video Corp and later became an AppleLink service called Quantum Link. They became AOL in 89 when they separated from Apple and offered internet modem pools starting in 91.
oh dear, I just skimmed for the founding date.
End of an era
+++ATH
Goodbye.
Man, AOL is so anachronistic, I thought for sure they had just misspelled AOC and was wondering why she had offered dial-up internet service in the first place.