Internet pioneer AOL (formerly known as America Online) will discontinue its dial-up access service late next month. Yes, believe it or not, AOL has continued to offer dial-up access to its services. AOL’s dial-up internet access was a mainstay for millions of users back in the 1990s.
The company, formerly owned by Time Warner, recently posted a notice on its website, saying the following:
AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.
This change will not affect any other benefits in your AOL plan, which you can access any time on your AOL plan dashboard. To manage or cancel your account, visit MyAccount.
For more information or if you have questions about your account, call:
- U.S. – 1-888-265-5555
- Canada – 1-888-265-4357
While broadband became the way to access the internet in recent year, AOL continued offering it dial-up service that allowed people to use a modem to access the service over a telephone landline. According to data from the 2023 US Census, approximately 160,000 people continue to connect to the internet through their landline telephone service
There is arguably not a person that was alive during the 90s that didn’t receive an AOL floppy disk or CD-ROM either in the mail, inside of a magazine, or saw a stack of free AOL CDs by the door of their favorite grocery or department store. When the AOL files would still fit on a floppy, many of us would collect the floppies and format them for use for our personal files. We all shed a tear when AOL moved to CD-ROMs to distribute their installations files.
AOL was also popular in pop culture, with movies like “You’ve Got Mail,” and television shows like “Sex and the City” highlighting the service.
AOL is a mere shadow of itself these days. The service’s popular AIM messaging service shut down in 2017 and AOL has been sold multiple times, even merging with Time Warner in what proved to be a bit of a fiasco. The service is currently owned by the same private equity firm that owns Yahoo.
A spokesperson said the “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.”
