After 34 years of connecting Americans to the Internet through phone lines, AOL recently announced it is 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.
AOL confirmed the shutdown date in a help message to customers: “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.”
AOL’s dial-up service launched as “America Online” in 1991, when the Internet consisted primarily of text-based content, although its dial-up roots extend back to a service launched in 1985 called Quantum Link for Commodore computers. For the next few years, as the World Wide Web emerged, websites were measured in kilobytes, images were small and compressed, and video was essentially impossible. The service grew alongside the web itself, peaking at over 20 million subscribers in the early 2000s before broadband adoption accelerated its decline.
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