Hanging Up: AOL To Pull The Plug On Its Dial-up Service After 36 Years

From the department of "Want to feel old?" comes news that AOL is finally pulling the plug on dial-up Internet access.

While there are very few users in the US who still connect to the Internet via modem and public telephone network, this termination – scheduled for September 30 – feels very much like the end of an era.

Dial-up was, for many, the only way to connect to the Internet before broadband became as ubiquitous as it is today. A user would use a modem, which could encode and decode audio signals, to connect to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) via a conventional telephone line. It wasn't quick, and connections could be affected by noise on the line or someone picking up an extension somewhere else in the house, but it was often all there was.

The advent of broadband signaled the rapid demise of dial-up. Always on and considerably faster, the technology was able to reach many homes, although users in remote areas struggled to make the move. However, the ever-increasing amount of data on the Internet meant that dial-up, which arguably reached its peak with speeds of around 56 kbit/s thanks to some nifty compression techniques, could not compete with the bandwidth on offer from even the slowest plans.

That's not to say dial-up as a concept is going away. There are plenty of commercial applications where a reliable, low-bandwidth connection is more than adequate. Some users in remote, rural areas might have few other options. However, the end of AOL dial-up is significant.

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The AOL brand dates back to 1989 and is now to be found under the Yahoo! umbrella. A spokesperson for Yahoo! told The Register: "We are discontinuing the dial-up internet service component included in certain legacy AOL Advantage, CompuServe, and Netscape Connect Plans as we innovate to meet the needs of today's digital landscape.

"This change does not impact the numerous other valued products and services that these subscribers are able to access and enjoy as part of their plans. There is also no impact to our users' free AOL email accounts."

Except, obviously, how affected users will get to them.

The number of users of AOL's dial-up service is reportedly in the low thousands. The Yahoo! spokesperson didn't confirm an exact number but said a "few" customers will be affected.

Americans who still need dial-up have other options. For example, NetZero offers what it calls "HiSpeed Accelerated Dial-Up" for $29.95 a month.

Other suppliers have long since deactivated dial-up – British Telecom pulled the plug in 2013 – but the September 30 termination for AOL's dial-up service will have triggered a wave of nostalgia for the days when the Compulink Information Exchange (CIX) reigned supreme (for UK nerds at least) and computers made a most alarming noise when connected to the Internet. ®