17 ms·

AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

228 points by situationista 1y ago

hopelite 1y ago
I’ve always wondered about the remaining users of the dial-up service. Who are they and what is the use case for using dial-up? Does anyone know?
- imzadi 1y ago
  Probably people in rural areas that have limited access to other options. Starlink has probably absorbed most of that market, so no need to have dial up anymore.
  - robertoandred 1y ago
    Starlink is so much more expensive though, more than a lot of people in rural areas can afford.
    - morkalork 1y ago
      Cellular internet. Edit: I'm not saying it's a good replacement for dialup, just that I have observed that many cell phone carriers are advertising plans for it now.
      - yladiz 1y ago
        In very rural places, they may only have edge or 3g at best, if they have any connection.
      - clint 1y ago
        Where I live in Colorado there is literally no cell coverage by any cellular provider. No 5/4/or 3G coverage in miles in any direction while outside and no matter how far up the mountain behind my house I climb. Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and they don't really care that its not true.
      - codazoda 1y ago
        Many rural areas have no cellular service. I vacation in an area where Satellite, landline phone service, and some very bad DSL service are the only options. Since it's a vacation spot, we opt not to use the internet there, but there are people who live there.
      - nemomarx 1y ago
        Rural mountainous areas have very bad cell coverage. When I grew up the local Verizon store didn't actually get signal and you had to drive up the road from there to take calls. Those are the kinda places I imagine are expensive to run new installs to, so it's really phone lines or satellite
      - jlokier 1y ago
        Here is "ping 8.8.8.8" showing latency over cellular internet some of the time, and I live in the centre of a city: 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6145 ttl=114 time=363613.635 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6175 ttl=114 time=334289.726 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6176 ttl=114 time=333689.274 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6177 ttl=114 time=332851.621 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6178 ttl=114 time=332673.845 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6179 ttl=114 time=332618.215 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6180 ttl=114 time=331634.496 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6181 ttl=114 time=330736.758 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6182 ttl=114 time=331050.087 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6183 ttl=114 time=330813.820 ms
        dbbr 1y ago
        5+ minutes for 8.8.8.8 to respond to a ping! Or am I reading this incorrectly?
        jlokier 1y ago
        You're reading it correctly. I was astonished too.
        jandrese 1y ago
        You can spend more for the higher tier plan that won't get your traffic prioritized down into the "best effort" tier. It looks like your neighbors have already done that. You may need to buy directly from whomever is running your towers and not a MVNO to get that. Honestly, I'm actually shocked and impressed that whatever is queuing your data up has enough buffer space to hold on the packets for so long without dropping them.
        jlokier 1y ago
        It's the Three network in the UK, not an MVNO, and I'm paying for the "unlimited data" plan. They don't offer a higher tier as far as I know. I've been using it every day for work for at least 10 years, and it served me very well, including all my remote work through the pandemic, gaming and Netflix, sometimes downloading terabytes per month without issues. But they've managed capacity disastrously in my area recently. For the last three months. Where I live, and other parts of the centre of town, every day for about 4 hours from 11am to 3pm, it goes offline most of the time, so the network is unusable. It's impossible to work - can't even do chat or an audio meeting. When I ran ping, I found it wasn't really offline sometimes. Sometimes it was just such high latency and/or packet loss that it may as well be. Signal strength was good, and voice calls worked fine. I tried three different 4G/5G routers, four different accounts, and two phones. All showed the same behaviours at the same times of day. At first folks in the Three store said I need newer 5G capable equipment, then it was a new SIM, but I tried all their options. In the end I returned everything to them, cancelled contracts, and they said it was most likely congestion, which fits the observations. I'm amazed they haven't fixed it, as it must have been affecting thousands of customers for months, in a way that's surely obvious to any monitoring equipment. With regard to the earlier poster's point about latency, when it worked perfectly my latency (both at home and in the office) was always at least 35ms or so, spiking randomly on a timescale of seconds up to about 400ms. Good for many things, but not the kinds of low-latency gaming, interactive streaming or other services some people take for granted. SSH felt annoyingly slow, but usable.
      - Spivak 1y ago
        No idea why you're being downvoted. I can right now today call AT&T and get 300Mb cellular internet for my house. It's $65/mo.
    - clint 1y ago
      You would be surprised how much people in extremely rural areas are being gouged for really crappy internet. I have a place less than an hour from Denver and without Starlink there are many, many people on extremely bad, oversubscribed 1Mbit DSL at the end of some gnarly POPs. There are sometimes local ISPs that provide p2p wifi in extremely limited areas (see: rich neighborhoods) and its fine but for 20/10 you're paying similar prices or more than Starlink for something that's less reliable.
      - londons_explore 1y ago
        But 56k dialup (actual speed more like 25k) is too slow to load an https certificate before most sites time out. You aren't going to be able to load google.com
        clint 1y ago
        You'll notice I didn't mention dialup at all in my comment.
    - jonbiggums22 1y ago
      Dialup could be had for very cheap last time I had if (big if) you had availability of cellular internet that is probably just as cheap now. However, the landline I had for dialup back in the day had become outright ridiculous in price by the time I convinced my wife we should cancel it (she liked that it worked when the power was out). It seems they don't even want to sell that service anymore. VoIP is cheap but you need internet for VoIP and I'm not actually sure you could connect a modem to a VoIP even if it wasn't nonsensical.
      - aaronbaugher 1y ago
        AT&T used to be the default landline provider for my address, but they recently got the regulators to release them from that responsibility, so now there isn't one. So I can't buy a landline for my property, even though there's copper running right past it and a pedestal where all they'd have to do is reconnect the line to my house. If I call AT&T, they'll sell me a cell phone, but not a landline. Fortunately I have fiber (from another company), so it's not a problem; but the concept of being able to get a landline anywhere is going away.
        jonbiggums22 1y ago
        Yeah, I think the POTS line is gone for good since I canceled it. The company doesn't even show it as an offering on their website any longer, only selling VoIP with DSL at this point. The cranked up price was probably a nudge to get rid of any holdouts.
      - fapjacks 1y ago
        No, it is not feasible to run modem signals over VOIP, as the various codecs all compress signals and cut frequencies and all manner of things to reduce bandwidth consumption, which are incompatible with modem signaling. You could get away with it in a homelab for fun, but you have absolutely no control over what VOIP codecs e.g. Comcast is running, so it is effectively impossible. Even if the phone company says they can offer you a copper line, your copper line will eventually get converted to VOIP at the end of the street or wherever, and then it's up to whatever commercial provider you're paying to choose the codecs for VOIP, which are never modem-friendly. I worked on this stuff about ten years ago. There are fax codecs but they are very hard to get working reliably.
- johnwheeler 1y ago
  Senior citizens who don’t know any better and never upgraded.then in their 50s now in their 70-80s.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  It couldn’t be too many people. Back in 2015, they only had 2.1 million dial up users and that number must have gone down in a decade https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/08/10/aol-dial-up-internet-discontinued/85601554007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/08/10/aol-dial-up-i... But then again, I would love to have a business that has 2.1 million people or even 100 thousand people paying $10 a month…
  - londons_explore 1y ago
    Doesn't seem to make sense for AOL to shut it down... I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems. Even with 100k customers, I doubt there are more than 0.1% of them connected at a time - the rest will just be paying the bill for a service they don't use.
    - protocolture 1y ago
      >I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems. Pretty much. But you might find reliably hardware hard to come by. It would be an ebay operation for sure, sort of like running an internet history museum.
      - londons_explore 1y ago
        software modems have been a thing for ages. No physical wires - it'll be voip direct to soft modems on a couple of big linux servers. You can probably do it all on AWS with no physical infra.
    - toast0 1y ago
      There's a few dial up wholesalers out there still. I don't know if the AOL dialer is still proprietary, but I would imagine they could outsource at least most of the pops to keep the revenue flowing, if they really wanted to. OTOH, maybe shutting down AOL dialup helps Verizon drop its landline business. All the ILECs seem to be in a race to eliminate landlines.
- londons_explore 1y ago
  Probably people who have had a recurring payment set up since 1995 and never questioned what they're paying $23.99 per month for the last 30 years for.
  - InitialLastName 1y ago
    I know at least two people who are still paying for an AOL dial-up subscription despite not using because they use an @aol email address and think it will be discontinued if they don't continue to pay for it.
    - criddell 1y ago
      Are they wrong?
      - Supermancho 1y ago
        Yes
      - InitialLastName 1y ago
        As far as I can tell, yes. AOL pretends that the subscription offers other services (tech support, "security" etc) but you definitely appear to be able to keep access to your email address without paying the $50/month subscription.
        bluedino 1y ago
        I switched phones and somehow lost my Netscape (owned by AOL) email password. Would'nt have been a big deal but I had it linked to some famous .com service that I have been using since the 90's. I paid something like $10 to have a live human reset the password and get back in.
- torgoguys 1y ago
  I had an elderly friend that still subscribed to AOL dialup until he died a couple of years ago. He had built his small business, which was very dependent on email, using an old AOL email address. The type of business he was in could involve old contacts suddenly appearing out of the blue again (via an email message) and so he wanted to maintain the AOL address to not lose that business. Long ago, when AOL stopped requiring an AOL subscription to maintain an AOL email address, I advised him to cancel the AOL subscription. After explaining to me how important that exact address was to him he declined, stating that by paying the monthly fee he felt very assured the email address wouldn't go away and without paying for he felt like that assurance just wasn't there. So for years he knowingly paid for dialup he no longer actually used.
  - da02 1y ago
    What type of business was it? Consulting?
    - torgoguys 1y ago
      He was a psychiatrist and did in-person corporate trainings on understanding and maximizing interpersonal communication in companies and teams. Myers-briggs types of things but I like to think his stuff was more valuable.
- stetrain 1y ago
  There are still a lot of people without access to broadband, or with only one provider which may be expensive. https://www.benton.org/blog/more-third-americans-have-access-one-or-no-broadband-provider https://www.benton.org/blog/more-third-americans-have-access... Starlink is definitely increasing availability but it's somewhat expensive.
  - xunil2ycom 1y ago
    I have Starlink for my personal/family internet and AT&T DSL for my wife's work-from-home office. They are comparably priced. What is really expensive is that AT&T wants a good $30k to build fiber out to my location. . . so I'm sticking with paying for two providers at the moment.
- MDGeist 1y ago
  I had an aunt who was a hold out until this past year. She was in a rather wooded and sparsely populated area and although faster internet became available awhile ago it was much more expensive and she was already used to the limitations of dial-up so she didn't feel compelled to make the jump. If she really needed fast internet for some reason (maybe emailing an attachment) she would drive to the nearest library.
- themadturk 1y ago
  Elderly people are often reluctant to change what they have grown used to. Not only did my mom continue to use dialup until she went into memory care in 2019, when her Windows XP machine died a couple of years earlier, she wanted me to make Windows 10 on her new machine look and act in every way like XP. (I was not successful at this.)
jonathaneunice 1y ago
TIL AOL still offered dial-up internet. At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.
- dfedbeef 1y ago
  TIL AOL still exists
  - poisonarena 1y ago
    I just made an AOL email address a few months ago and its not bad
  - xunil2ycom 1y ago
    Me, too.
  - ransom1538 1y ago
    Me in 2002: "Wtf is this paper bill mom? You pay for email?" Me in 2007: "Mom. Just... stop"
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Noooooo... Don't let the 90's end!
- empath75 1y ago
  When I worked at AOL about 10 years ago, dialup was _still_ responsible for 100% of their profits. Literally every other part of the company lost money (Mapquest, AIM, Huffington Post, their ad network, etc). They were making literally billions of dollars from it and it was like 90+% profit margin or something absurd. It was like a single server running millions of virtual modems.
trimbo 1y ago
Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!
- burntpineapple 1y ago
  [flagged]
- ecshafer 1y ago
  I worked on a help desk from 2013-2016 for an MSP that served some rural telcos. A couple of the clients still offered dial-up internet, so there were a few hundred people with dial up at that point. They were largely people with very rural homes that they didn't even have DSL. They were largely older people. And they just made a steady profit, the equipment and lines basically just worked and they had a FAR lower rate of calls than the DSL, Cable, Fiber, etc customers.
  - paulorlando 1y ago
    Reminds me of how AT&T continued generating revenue from renting landline phones many years after it became legal to own and connect your own equipment to their network.
    - sgerenser 1y ago
      Apparently this is still happening (although I imagine their customer base is rapidly dwindling): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLT_Consumer_Lease_Services https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLT_Consumer_Lease_Services
  - busterarm 1y ago
    I worked from 2011-2013 at a small regional ILEC that had some dialup customers. Yeah it largely just worked.
  - smelendez 1y ago
    I’m curious what those customers do today. Are they still using those computers with antique web browsers? Maybe email and Amazon are enough, though.
layer8 1y ago
Previous discussion two days ago, 101 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843369
drittich 1y ago
For younger users of the internet, it's hard to overstate how omnipresent the AOL brand was. The marketing team was on overdrive, all the time. And their marketing CDs probably caused a noticeable increase in CD-ROM adoption.
- throwawayoldie 1y ago
  They also disrupted the coaster industry by constantly mailing out free ones.
  - aaronbaugher 1y ago
    Also the scarecrow industry. I recall people hanging CDs in their garden, as the sun reflecting off them as they moved in the breeze would scare away crows.
- TechDebtDevin 1y ago
  What did those CD's actually contain? A browser with some firmware?
  - achandlerwhite 1y ago
    lol no. They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.
    - aaronbaugher 1y ago
      Yep. When we started an ISP about 1994, we gave the users a floppy that installed Trumpet Winsock, Netscape, and a handful of other programs for things like IRC and Usenet. Trumpet Winsock provided the dialup and networking which Windows 3.1 didn't have. AOL would have had to provide something similar, though all custom for connecting to their network.
    - chasd00 1y ago
      The desktop client had something like a browser. iirc you could get to the Internet but it was like AOL's version of the Internet. There was a keyword based search but I think websites had to register specific keywords with AOL or something like that to show up. The big thing with AOL was the "you've got mail!" sound once you connected. That voice was like a pop-culture meme back then.
unethical_ban 1y ago
I got 600 hours free with a copy of Chex Quest (DooM reskin for kids) in a box of cereal.
- dfedbeef 1y ago
  I FORGOT ABOUT CHEX QUEST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest
  - freedomben 1y ago
    Oh dude, I played a ton of Chex Quest back in the day. They did a really good job with implementation there. Honestly, an utterly brilliant marketing plan because to this day I still have major warm vibes for Chex brand. Wish they'd up the protein to carb ratio a bit though so I could eat it in good conscience :-)
  - Minor49er 1y ago
    But do you remember the Mr. Pibb first-person shooter? https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-the-3d-interactive-game-e5v https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-the-3d-interactiv...
gwbas1c 1y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20250811145846/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/business/aol-dial-up-internet.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250811145846/https://www.nytim...
st_goliath 1y ago
So, eternal September is now officially coming to an end?
- busterarm 1y ago
  AOL pulled the plug on usenet access 20 years ago.
- msgodel 1y ago
  It's funny, many people complain that the web got way worse after smartphones became common. It's the second eternal September.
tomxor 1y ago
> Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilobits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.
- icedchai 1y ago
  On top of that, almost nobody actually connected at 56K. You needed a perfect phone line. Still, compression did help a bit. Dialup latency sucked though. It was 100's of milliseconds. I had a friend with a 56K ISDN line (data over voice channel) and it was much better performance (10's of milliseconds.)
  - varispeed 1y ago
    I remember connecting at 56K. I couldn't afford real 56K modem, but there were cheaper ones that offloaded communication to the CPU. When parents weren't home I was rewiring the socket to connect my modem. So not ideal, but worked. Explaining high bills was fun.
    - icedchai 1y ago
      You may have connected at 56K, but it was rare to see in practice. I worked for an ISP and we could see all the stats. We had Ascend Max equipment. To add further confusion, your modem may have been reporting the serial port rate, not the actual line rate.
      - varispeed 1y ago
        Makes sense. Just like today my phone shows 5G and full bars, but is as slow as dial up.
        icedchai 1y ago
        Yes! Also, early ISPs were often massively over subscribed. They might have fractional T1 line coming into a POP (example: 384Kbit line) with 100 modems off of it. At peak times, you not only got busy signals, but when you did get through, a slow connection because that upstream pipe was full...
magicalhippo 1y ago
This reminded me of BBS'[1], which again reminded me of the older days where you sent letters and got one back a week or three later. I had programmed a lot in Delphi before I started programming in C++, and the orders of magnitude slower build times caused me to program very differently. I would re-read several times and reason much more about my code before issuing a build command. Whereas in Delphi, the almost instantaneous builds meant I used it almost like a spell checker. Back in the BBS days you left a message and checked back in a day. Perhaps its rose tinted glasses I've got on but I feel todays instantaneous communication isn't always for the better. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
- da02 1y ago
  Any thoughts on using Rust, Go, or Zig?
  - magicalhippo 1y ago
    Been tempted to try Zig. Rust made my head hurt just looking at it. A bit incidental though, I was mainly romanticizing communicating more slowly and deliberately.
gamache 1y ago
Pour one out, RIP to a real one. In the early 00's, I used the CDs for free internet access on vacation. There was a local dialup number ~wherever you were and it was plenty fine for email and browsing the web of the time, and as long as you cancelled within a month, it didn't cost a cent.
da02 1y ago
In case you have elderly relatives and T-mobile is available in your area, it might be useful to contact T-Mobile (via X.com or retail service) and ask for the "Basic Mobile Internet 30GB" plan (Service Order Code: MI30TI or MI30TE) It is $10/month for 30GB with auto-pay. Then get an unlocked phone and put in the T-Mobile Sim card and activate the hotspot (or via USB tethering since Wifi is too complicated for them). Although, I am not sure how you would limit the speed down to 56k to prevent them from going over the 30GB limit.
- jandrese 1y ago
  The caveat with this is that many people on dialup are the ones who live too far from civilization to get cell coverage. The only reason they have phone service at all is government incentives in the mid 20th century.
  - coolspot 1y ago
    For that case, Starlink is $10/m for 10GB, $50/m for 50GB or $80/m for unlimited (fixed location).
yonaguska 1y ago
I used it in boarding school as a proxy tunnel that actually worked. It was too slow to do anything useful, but, I had bought napoleon total war, and the network blocked whatever DRM it was using to allow me to play. I ended up bypassing it by simply using an aol disc. I ended up pirating the game I had paid for later simply bc it was too much of a pain to keep using AOL.
MarkusWandel 1y ago
Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat. My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached. Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback if you go over your limit. Hey, 4x as fast as she had before, effectively unlimited right? Wrong. Bloat was by now such that sites simply wouldn't load at 128kbps. Things timed out before all the bloat was loaded and you would not get the UI regardless how patient you were. Hacker News still worked of course.
- jonbiggums22 1y ago
  Had a similar experience. I grew up in a rural area and broadband penetration was late. Later when I bought a house I was lied to by comcast about availability and ended up dialup again. (My fault for believing them tbh) Most of the tricks I used to make the most out of a dialup connection (disable images, disable flash player, load multiple pages so they could be browsed offline) didn't make a difference anymore. In the case of loading multiple pages, lazy loading meant this didn't really work. It was a much more brutal experience than the first go around. The worst part was how little actual content actually makes up the bloat. Sure video was right out, but I was often struggling to load pages that were mostly text. The only other option at the time was Hugesnet. After doing the math I determined the data caps were so low dialup was actually cheaper at MBs/month and had less latency issues. Realistically the next best available step up wasn't Hughesnet it was shotgunned 56K.
  - RiverCrochet 1y ago
    A firm I used to do network work for had Hughesnet as failover Internet for a couple locations. I always knew they were on it by the 500ms+ pings. Better than nothing though for sure. And I'd also believe that's typical of any non-Starlink Internet around the end of the 2010s.
    - MarkusWandel 1y ago
lousken 1y ago
Downloading 200MB Windows 98 update was the adrenaline back then.
- freedomben 1y ago
  For me it was downloading mp3 files and only letting Winamp play them on repeat as they download. At first you just got a second or two of sound, and it would add maybe a second on each play. Eventually the magic of compound interest would get you the whole song, and that was a major adrenaline rush
- sys_64738 1y ago
  I remember downloading IE4 over a phone line at the inlaws. It took hours for a few MB. It was worse if I recall as I already had broadband via Road Runner back then (1998).
em3rgent0rdr 1y ago
Imagine the final dial-up.
jlarocco 1y ago
As much crap as AOL used to get, there's not much difference between their chat in 1996 and Teams and Slack now. And it managed to do it with 8 Mb of RAM over a 14.4k modem. Of course it didn't have video, but the group chat itself was basically the same. In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.
- Hobadee 1y ago
  Except that the AIM protocol was reverse-enginnereed and you could then use a single client (GAIM/Pidgeon, Trillian) to talk to all your friends. The protocols nowadays are so locked down that there has yet to be a decent 3rd party implementation.
  - Melatonic 1y ago
    Loved Trillian
  - jlarocco 1y ago
    The AOL chat rooms were different than AIM. From the chat room you could open instant messages to specific people, and that one-on-one chat eventually became AIM. For one-on-one messaging, the 3rd party clients were often better, but I don't remember any 3rd party clients for the chat rooms. I only used them from the AOL application itself.
- burntwater 1y ago
  The sound effects were way better back then. "You've got mail!". The doors opening/closing. Though maybe it's different because back then, then meant someone I wanted to interact with was now available. Today, a chat sound means someone I probably don't want to, but am required to, interact with is now available.
  - BLKNSLVR 1y ago
    I had a thought a couple of days ago about the flood of emails and notifications that we enjoy the privilege of these days and came to the conclusion that, the value of the notification has a direct relationship with he amount of effort that went into creating it and the number of recipients it's destined for. The effort that goes into a bulk email is divided by the number of recipients, and therefore its value to me rounds down to zero. The value of an email that's manually written by management (or an assistant at the direction of management) that goes to all staff or my team is divided by the size of it's distribution list. Higher than zero value. An email sent to me by a friend or colleague to ask a question or organise a meeting or get together has a high value because I'm the only recipient; it was specifically for me. We need a method to rank these things, and then we need to personally choose some minimum floor at which notifications will 'ping' on our chosen device.
tombert 1y ago
A small part of me has debated artificially limiting my internet speeds to 56k, to see how well I could actually live with dial-up speeds. If I did everything with w3m and Mutt and whatnot, I could see myself living almost comfortably.
- throwzasdf 1y ago
  Enable Chrome Developer Tools, you can choose the simulated speed to test.
  - tombert 1y ago
    yeah but that wouldn't work with Mutt and w3m.
- somat 1y ago
  I run an openbsd firewall and was able to setup queues to limit connection speed. I mainly use it to banish iot devices to the shadow realm. (connectivity detection appears to work but it is slow enough that nothing really gets done) If not on obsd the logic is usually the same, just read up on how your router implements fair service queues. queue base0 on em0 bandwidth 100M max 100M queue full parent base0 flows 128 bandwidth 100M qlimit 128 default queue limited parent base0 flows 128 bandwidth 1K max 1K qlimit 128 match in on em1 queue limited Another fun shadow realm technique is to see how much packet loss the device can tolerate with a rule like block in on em1 probability 20% But this tends to trip the connectivity detector.
1024core 1y ago
I remember a few years (OK, more than a few) ago, ATT decided to discontinue renting out touchtone phones. It seems once upon a time, people paid ATT something like $5/mo to rent this new-fangled "touch tone" technology. And there were like a million people in California regularly paying ATT (or PacBell or whoever inherited ATTs customers) $60/year to rent a phone that you could buy outright for $10 in your local Walgreens or Walmart.
- xunil2ycom 1y ago
  To be fair, that was a holdover from when AT&T held a monopoly on phones via Western Electric. Some folks probably just didn't bother changing out their phone after the divestiture.
- aidenn0 1y ago
  It used to violate your customer agreement with ma bell to connect any personally owned equipment to the phone lines. My first phone was a bakelite pulse-dialing phone that had the ringer clipped, because they used to measure the number of extensions by the resistance on the ringer circuit (this was well after that requirement was quashed by the courts, but it was a phone I inherited).
- spauldo 1y ago
  Touch-tone service charge was still a thing in the 90s at Southwestern Bell. My grandpa told 'em he didn't want it because all his phones were still rotary, so they removed the charge. Turned out that they didn't actually have rotary-only service. My aunt got a princess phone for Christmas and I plugged it in for her with the touch-tone switch on. She could dial out just fine.
xunil2ycom 1y ago
The article mentions AOL CDs being ubiquitous. I remember the 3.5 in floppies before the CDs. At least one could put something in the write protect hole and reformat them. The CDs ended up as so much garbage.
whoomp12342 1y ago
I wish they could mail this article on a free CD behind a paywall...
pcdoodle 1y ago
The killer feature of dialup these days would be email. Let it connect, download the attachments, free up the phone line.
tech234a 1y ago
Still available from MSN for the time being: https://get.msn.com/ https://get.msn.com/
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Still remember when AOL cut our internet after I got spicy at 9 years old because I was mad at my cousin. Mom was very unhappy. We got internet back, but I wasnt allowed on for months. Lots of memories there. I remember getting into Star Craft and my sister logged in from Puerto Rico which would disconnect me in Florida almost all the time. I really hated when my sister did this, so I borrowed my friends AOL login info, he was online way less than me.
JSR_FDED 1y ago
I remember going from ATDP to ATDT… just one letter but I felt I was living in the future :-)
keith82 1y ago
I do IT stuff for a local pizza chain. They are still on an ancient Linux POS system. With dumb terminals using PS/2 keyboards with 3 rows of function keys for buttons for every pizza topping and such. I’ve kept them running cloning the old drives to compact flash cards and IDE readers. However to get the software license blessed again it requires the sole developer who lives in Thailand now to ssh in over dial up.
- slow_typist 1y ago
  OMG how can you do business like that, depending on a sole developer. Ever thought of cracking the software?
can16358p 1y ago
I'm actually surprised that it still existed anyway. Dial-up (not AOL but anyway) nostalgia: I remember the excitement of waiting for hours to download a simple file and watching it go 98%, 99% and 100% as connection drops were frequent and many servers didn't support resuming downloads at that era meaning you had to start over if it failed at any point. I also remember switching from dial up to a blazingly fast 512 Kbps ADSL, which sometimes (probably due to a bug in ISP) became an "unbelievably fast" 2048 Kbps line, downloading files around 200 KB/s which seemed futuristic. Good old times.
- nashashmi 1y ago
  AOL Dial up was quite profitable for a long time. And was the basis of selling aol desktop.
- epolanski 1y ago
  I remember my first "wow, I downloaded an mp3 song faster than I can listen it" with ADSL.
sans_souse 1y ago
Those dial-up sounds are pure nostalgia. It's amazing when you consider loading a .jpg used to occur gruellingly slow on dial-up, and downloading a 5mb file might take hours. Now we stream HD video without (much) hiccup even on slow fiber, cable etc.
noufalibrahim 1y ago
So many pieces of the internet being discontinued. A little nostalgic but I don't really see the point in keeping dial up alive anymore. When I was first exposed to the net, I used an email to http proxy. It was called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(web_browser) and you sent a certain email address emails with requests for pages, posting to forms etc. Then walked away and came back and checked your inbox for responses. It was quirky but I did get some documentation and largish poster of Steve Vai back in the day using this which was kind of cool I guess. I sent so many emails (first from pine and then from mutt) that I remember the email address by heart. agora@dna.affrc.go.jp
FerretFred 1y ago
I went through a phase a couple of years ago where I was setting up my Linux Thinkpad T480 with every accessory I could find. My heart leapt with joy when I found an affordable USB-modem dongle and was excited to try it out. TBH the only service I could find was a US-based fax service but that worked really well. Sadly, all the BBSs I'd hoped to try out had long since converted to Telnet, but hey, it was cool to think that if I ever needed to dialup anything I could actually do it
timbit42 1y ago
My first modem was the 300 baud VIC Modem Commodore made for the Commodore VIC-20. It was supposed to be the first modem for under $100 which they achieved by not having those rubber cups for the receiver. Instead, it plugged directly into the wall. Years later I found out the first modems were 110 baud. I bought the VIC Modem second hand but the only thing I could connect to was another friend who had a modem. We transferred some files but decided it was faster to drive over to his house with a disk and then drive back. I also tried connecting to a data service listed in the yellow pages, and the modem would connect, but then I couldn't get it to do anything. The service was listed as being free but I didn't realize it was a long distance call to connect to it and that wasn't free so my parents ended up with an $80 long distance bill from my modem calls. Then I had a 1200 baud modem Commodore made for the Commodore 64. Again, I was only able to connect with other friends who had a modem. When I got my Amiga 2000, I set up a BBS (FidoNet 1:255/42) with a SupraModem 2400. Later they had a deal for sysops to get their new 14,400 modem. I can't remember if it was buy-one-get-one-free, or buy-one-get-one-half-price. I only had one phone line so I sold the second one to a friend who used my BBS the most. At least someone could benefit from my having 14,400. I also remember playing Battle Chess over the modem with a friend who had a PC clone. We were playing one day and my mom called me to supper so I set Battle Chess on my Amiga to autoplay while I was eating. When I came back my friend had no idea I had left. Good laugh. I think I had a 33,600 next and then finally a 56K before moving to a city where they were testing HFC internet which was hybrid-fibre-coax around 1997 and was 10 Mbit/s both up and down. It was screaming fast compared to dialup and I could download a CD ISO in under 20 seconds while my friend back home were still downloading ISO images via dialup. (Just did the math and it should only take 8 to 9 seconds, so I guess there was a bottleneck somewhere).
timbit42 1y ago
In 1997 I got a job at a college where only the college administrators had internet and it was via WinProxy and a modem on my desktop PC. They were paying for a number of ISP email addresses. They also had a static website hosted elsewhere on a pre-OSX Mac. I was able to propose spending $1,000 on a web/email server and putting in a 56K ISDN line for a lower monthly cost. This also gave them full control over their web server to write PHP and use MySQL. It also allowed every staff member to have an email on their own domain and web access. We also put Squid proxy on the server to cache some of the web browsing. It worked well. Later when we were able to upgrade to DSL, we also added the computer lab to the internet. Fun times.
NtG_UK 1y ago
My first “modem” was this fantastically beige 300-baud hand-me-down acoustic coupler from 1984: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13106/Epson-CX-21-Acoustic-Coupler/ https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13106/Epson-CX-21-Ac... A family friend came round and used it to hook up my Atari ST to a local BBS. Mind-blowing. I got a brief glimpse of the future that day. Local calls not being free, I wasn’t allowed to repeat the experiment until we signed up for MSN in 1996. Didn’t stop younger me switching on the acoustic coupler with no computer attached and trying “communicate” with it by making “shhhh” noises into the cups :D

228 points by situationista 1y ago

I’ve always wondered about the remaining users of the dial-up service. Who are they and what is the use case for using dial-up? Does anyone know?

imzadi 1y ago
Probably people in rural areas that have limited access to other options. Starlink has probably absorbed most of that market, so no need to have dial up anymore.
- robertoandred 1y ago
  Starlink is so much more expensive though, more than a lot of people in rural areas can afford.
  - morkalork 1y ago
    Cellular internet. Edit: I'm not saying it's a good replacement for dialup, just that I have observed that many cell phone carriers are advertising plans for it now.
    - yladiz 1y ago
      In very rural places, they may only have edge or 3g at best, if they have any connection.
    - clint 1y ago
      Where I live in Colorado there is literally no cell coverage by any cellular provider. No 5/4/or 3G coverage in miles in any direction while outside and no matter how far up the mountain behind my house I climb. Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and they don't really care that its not true.
    - codazoda 1y ago
      Many rural areas have no cellular service. I vacation in an area where Satellite, landline phone service, and some very bad DSL service are the only options. Since it's a vacation spot, we opt not to use the internet there, but there are people who live there.
    - nemomarx 1y ago
      Rural mountainous areas have very bad cell coverage. When I grew up the local Verizon store didn't actually get signal and you had to drive up the road from there to take calls. Those are the kinda places I imagine are expensive to run new installs to, so it's really phone lines or satellite
    - jlokier 1y ago
      Here is "ping 8.8.8.8" showing latency over cellular internet some of the time, and I live in the centre of a city: 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6145 ttl=114 time=363613.635 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6175 ttl=114 time=334289.726 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6176 ttl=114 time=333689.274 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6177 ttl=114 time=332851.621 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6178 ttl=114 time=332673.845 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6179 ttl=114 time=332618.215 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6180 ttl=114 time=331634.496 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6181 ttl=114 time=330736.758 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6182 ttl=114 time=331050.087 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6183 ttl=114 time=330813.820 ms
      - dbbr 1y ago
        5+ minutes for 8.8.8.8 to respond to a ping! Or am I reading this incorrectly?
        jlokier 1y ago
        You're reading it correctly. I was astonished too.
      - jandrese 1y ago
        You can spend more for the higher tier plan that won't get your traffic prioritized down into the "best effort" tier. It looks like your neighbors have already done that. You may need to buy directly from whomever is running your towers and not a MVNO to get that. Honestly, I'm actually shocked and impressed that whatever is queuing your data up has enough buffer space to hold on the packets for so long without dropping them.
        jlokier 1y ago
        It's the Three network in the UK, not an MVNO, and I'm paying for the "unlimited data" plan. They don't offer a higher tier as far as I know. I've been using it every day for work for at least 10 years, and it served me very well, including all my remote work through the pandemic, gaming and Netflix, sometimes downloading terabytes per month without issues. But they've managed capacity disastrously in my area recently. For the last three months. Where I live, and other parts of the centre of town, every day for about 4 hours from 11am to 3pm, it goes offline most of the time, so the network is unusable. It's impossible to work - can't even do chat or an audio meeting. When I ran ping, I found it wasn't really offline sometimes. Sometimes it was just such high latency and/or packet loss that it may as well be. Signal strength was good, and voice calls worked fine. I tried three different 4G/5G routers, four different accounts, and two phones. All showed the same behaviours at the same times of day. At first folks in the Three store said I need newer 5G capable equipment, then it was a new SIM, but I tried all their options. In the end I returned everything to them, cancelled contracts, and they said it was most likely congestion, which fits the observations. I'm amazed they haven't fixed it, as it must have been affecting thousands of customers for months, in a way that's surely obvious to any monitoring equipment. With regard to the earlier poster's point about latency, when it worked perfectly my latency (both at home and in the office) was always at least 35ms or so, spiking randomly on a timescale of seconds up to about 400ms. Good for many things, but not the kinds of low-latency gaming, interactive streaming or other services some people take for granted. SSH felt annoyingly slow, but usable.
    - Spivak 1y ago
      No idea why you're being downvoted. I can right now today call AT&T and get 300Mb cellular internet for my house. It's $65/mo.
  - clint 1y ago
    You would be surprised how much people in extremely rural areas are being gouged for really crappy internet. I have a place less than an hour from Denver and without Starlink there are many, many people on extremely bad, oversubscribed 1Mbit DSL at the end of some gnarly POPs. There are sometimes local ISPs that provide p2p wifi in extremely limited areas (see: rich neighborhoods) and its fine but for 20/10 you're paying similar prices or more than Starlink for something that's less reliable.
    - londons_explore 1y ago
      But 56k dialup (actual speed more like 25k) is too slow to load an https certificate before most sites time out. You aren't going to be able to load google.com
      - clint 1y ago
        You'll notice I didn't mention dialup at all in my comment.
  - jonbiggums22 1y ago
    Dialup could be had for very cheap last time I had if (big if) you had availability of cellular internet that is probably just as cheap now. However, the landline I had for dialup back in the day had become outright ridiculous in price by the time I convinced my wife we should cancel it (she liked that it worked when the power was out). It seems they don't even want to sell that service anymore. VoIP is cheap but you need internet for VoIP and I'm not actually sure you could connect a modem to a VoIP even if it wasn't nonsensical.
    - aaronbaugher 1y ago
      AT&T used to be the default landline provider for my address, but they recently got the regulators to release them from that responsibility, so now there isn't one. So I can't buy a landline for my property, even though there's copper running right past it and a pedestal where all they'd have to do is reconnect the line to my house. If I call AT&T, they'll sell me a cell phone, but not a landline. Fortunately I have fiber (from another company), so it's not a problem; but the concept of being able to get a landline anywhere is going away.
      - jonbiggums22 1y ago
        Yeah, I think the POTS line is gone for good since I canceled it. The company doesn't even show it as an offering on their website any longer, only selling VoIP with DSL at this point. The cranked up price was probably a nudge to get rid of any holdouts.
    - fapjacks 1y ago
      No, it is not feasible to run modem signals over VOIP, as the various codecs all compress signals and cut frequencies and all manner of things to reduce bandwidth consumption, which are incompatible with modem signaling. You could get away with it in a homelab for fun, but you have absolutely no control over what VOIP codecs e.g. Comcast is running, so it is effectively impossible. Even if the phone company says they can offer you a copper line, your copper line will eventually get converted to VOIP at the end of the street or wherever, and then it's up to whatever commercial provider you're paying to choose the codecs for VOIP, which are never modem-friendly. I worked on this stuff about ten years ago. There are fax codecs but they are very hard to get working reliably.
johnwheeler 1y ago
Senior citizens who don’t know any better and never upgraded.then in their 50s now in their 70-80s.
scarface_74 1y ago
It couldn’t be too many people. Back in 2015, they only had 2.1 million dial up users and that number must have gone down in a decade https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/08/10/aol-dial-up-internet-discontinued/85601554007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/08/10/aol-dial-up-i... But then again, I would love to have a business that has 2.1 million people or even 100 thousand people paying $10 a month…
- londons_explore 1y ago
  Doesn't seem to make sense for AOL to shut it down... I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems. Even with 100k customers, I doubt there are more than 0.1% of them connected at a time - the rest will just be paying the bill for a service they don't use.
  - protocolture 1y ago
    >I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems. Pretty much. But you might find reliably hardware hard to come by. It would be an ebay operation for sure, sort of like running an internet history museum.
    - londons_explore 1y ago
      software modems have been a thing for ages. No physical wires - it'll be voip direct to soft modems on a couple of big linux servers. You can probably do it all on AWS with no physical infra.
  - toast0 1y ago
    There's a few dial up wholesalers out there still. I don't know if the AOL dialer is still proprietary, but I would imagine they could outsource at least most of the pops to keep the revenue flowing, if they really wanted to. OTOH, maybe shutting down AOL dialup helps Verizon drop its landline business. All the ILECs seem to be in a race to eliminate landlines.
londons_explore 1y ago
Probably people who have had a recurring payment set up since 1995 and never questioned what they're paying $23.99 per month for the last 30 years for.
- InitialLastName 1y ago
  I know at least two people who are still paying for an AOL dial-up subscription despite not using because they use an @aol email address and think it will be discontinued if they don't continue to pay for it.
  - criddell 1y ago
    Are they wrong?
    - Supermancho 1y ago
      Yes
    - InitialLastName 1y ago
      As far as I can tell, yes. AOL pretends that the subscription offers other services (tech support, "security" etc) but you definitely appear to be able to keep access to your email address without paying the $50/month subscription.
      - bluedino 1y ago
        I switched phones and somehow lost my Netscape (owned by AOL) email password. Would'nt have been a big deal but I had it linked to some famous .com service that I have been using since the 90's. I paid something like $10 to have a live human reset the password and get back in.
torgoguys 1y ago
I had an elderly friend that still subscribed to AOL dialup until he died a couple of years ago. He had built his small business, which was very dependent on email, using an old AOL email address. The type of business he was in could involve old contacts suddenly appearing out of the blue again (via an email message) and so he wanted to maintain the AOL address to not lose that business. Long ago, when AOL stopped requiring an AOL subscription to maintain an AOL email address, I advised him to cancel the AOL subscription. After explaining to me how important that exact address was to him he declined, stating that by paying the monthly fee he felt very assured the email address wouldn't go away and without paying for he felt like that assurance just wasn't there. So for years he knowingly paid for dialup he no longer actually used.
- da02 1y ago
  What type of business was it? Consulting?
  - torgoguys 1y ago
    He was a psychiatrist and did in-person corporate trainings on understanding and maximizing interpersonal communication in companies and teams. Myers-briggs types of things but I like to think his stuff was more valuable.
stetrain 1y ago
There are still a lot of people without access to broadband, or with only one provider which may be expensive. https://www.benton.org/blog/more-third-americans-have-access-one-or-no-broadband-provider https://www.benton.org/blog/more-third-americans-have-access... Starlink is definitely increasing availability but it's somewhat expensive.
- xunil2ycom 1y ago
  I have Starlink for my personal/family internet and AT&T DSL for my wife's work-from-home office. They are comparably priced. What is really expensive is that AT&T wants a good $30k to build fiber out to my location. . . so I'm sticking with paying for two providers at the moment.
MDGeist 1y ago
I had an aunt who was a hold out until this past year. She was in a rather wooded and sparsely populated area and although faster internet became available awhile ago it was much more expensive and she was already used to the limitations of dial-up so she didn't feel compelled to make the jump. If she really needed fast internet for some reason (maybe emailing an attachment) she would drive to the nearest library.
themadturk 1y ago
Elderly people are often reluctant to change what they have grown used to. Not only did my mom continue to use dialup until she went into memory care in 2019, when her Windows XP machine died a couple of years earlier, she wanted me to make Windows 10 on her new machine look and act in every way like XP. (I was not successful at this.)

jonathaneunice 1y ago

TIL AOL still offered dial-up internet. At long last, the 1990s will soon come to an end.

dfedbeef 1y ago
TIL AOL still exists
- poisonarena 1y ago
  I just made an AOL email address a few months ago and its not bad
- xunil2ycom 1y ago
  Me, too.
- ransom1538 1y ago
  Me in 2002: "Wtf is this paper bill mom? You pay for email?" Me in 2007: "Mom. Just... stop"
JKCalhoun 1y ago
Noooooo... Don't let the 90's end!
empath75 1y ago
When I worked at AOL about 10 years ago, dialup was _still_ responsible for 100% of their profits. Literally every other part of the company lost money (Mapquest, AIM, Huffington Post, their ad network, etc). They were making literally billions of dollars from it and it was like 90+% profit margin or something absurd. It was like a single server running millions of virtual modems.

trimbo 1y ago

Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!

burntpineapple 1y ago
[flagged]
ecshafer 1y ago
I worked on a help desk from 2013-2016 for an MSP that served some rural telcos. A couple of the clients still offered dial-up internet, so there were a few hundred people with dial up at that point. They were largely people with very rural homes that they didn't even have DSL. They were largely older people. And they just made a steady profit, the equipment and lines basically just worked and they had a FAR lower rate of calls than the DSL, Cable, Fiber, etc customers.
- paulorlando 1y ago
  Reminds me of how AT&T continued generating revenue from renting landline phones many years after it became legal to own and connect your own equipment to their network.
  - sgerenser 1y ago
    Apparently this is still happening (although I imagine their customer base is rapidly dwindling): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLT_Consumer_Lease_Services https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLT_Consumer_Lease_Services
- busterarm 1y ago
  I worked from 2011-2013 at a small regional ILEC that had some dialup customers. Yeah it largely just worked.
- smelendez 1y ago
  I’m curious what those customers do today. Are they still using those computers with antique web browsers? Maybe email and Amazon are enough, though.

layer8 1y ago

Previous discussion two days ago, 101 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843369

drittich 1y ago

For younger users of the internet, it's hard to overstate how omnipresent the AOL brand was. The marketing team was on overdrive, all the time. And their marketing CDs probably caused a noticeable increase in CD-ROM adoption.

throwawayoldie 1y ago
They also disrupted the coaster industry by constantly mailing out free ones.
- aaronbaugher 1y ago
  Also the scarecrow industry. I recall people hanging CDs in their garden, as the sun reflecting off them as they moved in the breeze would scare away crows.
TechDebtDevin 1y ago
What did those CD's actually contain? A browser with some firmware?
- achandlerwhite 1y ago
  lol no. They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.
  - aaronbaugher 1y ago
    Yep. When we started an ISP about 1994, we gave the users a floppy that installed Trumpet Winsock, Netscape, and a handful of other programs for things like IRC and Usenet. Trumpet Winsock provided the dialup and networking which Windows 3.1 didn't have. AOL would have had to provide something similar, though all custom for connecting to their network.
  - chasd00 1y ago
    The desktop client had something like a browser. iirc you could get to the Internet but it was like AOL's version of the Internet. There was a keyword based search but I think websites had to register specific keywords with AOL or something like that to show up. The big thing with AOL was the "you've got mail!" sound once you connected. That voice was like a pop-culture meme back then.

unethical_ban 1y ago

I got 600 hours free with a copy of Chex Quest (DooM reskin for kids) in a box of cereal.

dfedbeef 1y ago
I FORGOT ABOUT CHEX QUEST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chex_Quest
- freedomben 1y ago
  Oh dude, I played a ton of Chex Quest back in the day. They did a really good job with implementation there. Honestly, an utterly brilliant marketing plan because to this day I still have major warm vibes for Chex brand. Wish they'd up the protein to carb ratio a bit though so I could eat it in good conscience :-)
- Minor49er 1y ago
  But do you remember the Mr. Pibb first-person shooter? https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-the-3d-interactive-game-e5v https://www.myabandonware.com/game/mr-pibb-the-3d-interactiv...

gwbas1c 1y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20250811145846/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/business/aol-dial-up-internet.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250811145846/https://www.nytim...

st_goliath 1y ago

So, eternal September is now officially coming to an end?

busterarm 1y ago
AOL pulled the plug on usenet access 20 years ago.
msgodel 1y ago
It's funny, many people complain that the web got way worse after smartphones became common. It's the second eternal September.

tomxor 1y ago

> Dial-up internet speeds average about 56 kilobytes a second Nope, that would be considered crazy fast back in the day, it was 56 kilobits per second. That's about 6.8 kilobytes, but realistically and with overhead it was usually around 5KB/s.

icedchai 1y ago
On top of that, almost nobody actually connected at 56K. You needed a perfect phone line. Still, compression did help a bit. Dialup latency sucked though. It was 100's of milliseconds. I had a friend with a 56K ISDN line (data over voice channel) and it was much better performance (10's of milliseconds.)
- varispeed 1y ago
  I remember connecting at 56K. I couldn't afford real 56K modem, but there were cheaper ones that offloaded communication to the CPU. When parents weren't home I was rewiring the socket to connect my modem. So not ideal, but worked. Explaining high bills was fun.
  - icedchai 1y ago
    You may have connected at 56K, but it was rare to see in practice. I worked for an ISP and we could see all the stats. We had Ascend Max equipment. To add further confusion, your modem may have been reporting the serial port rate, not the actual line rate.
    - varispeed 1y ago
      Makes sense. Just like today my phone shows 5G and full bars, but is as slow as dial up.
      - icedchai 1y ago
        Yes! Also, early ISPs were often massively over subscribed. They might have fractional T1 line coming into a POP (example: 384Kbit line) with 100 modems off of it. At peak times, you not only got busy signals, but when you did get through, a slow connection because that upstream pipe was full...

magicalhippo 1y ago

This reminded me of BBS'[1], which again reminded me of the older days where you sent letters and got one back a week or three later. I had programmed a lot in Delphi before I started programming in C++, and the orders of magnitude slower build times caused me to program very differently. I would re-read several times and reason much more about my code before issuing a build command. Whereas in Delphi, the almost instantaneous builds meant I used it almost like a spell checker. Back in the BBS days you left a message and checked back in a day. Perhaps its rose tinted glasses I've got on but I feel todays instantaneous communication isn't always for the better. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

da02 1y ago
Any thoughts on using Rust, Go, or Zig?
- magicalhippo 1y ago
  Been tempted to try Zig. Rust made my head hurt just looking at it. A bit incidental though, I was mainly romanticizing communicating more slowly and deliberately.

gamache 1y ago

Pour one out, RIP to a real one. In the early 00's, I used the CDs for free internet access on vacation. There was a local dialup number ~wherever you were and it was plenty fine for email and browsing the web of the time, and as long as you cancelled within a month, it didn't cost a cent.

da02 1y ago

In case you have elderly relatives and T-mobile is available in your area, it might be useful to contact T-Mobile (via X.com or retail service) and ask for the "Basic Mobile Internet 30GB" plan (Service Order Code: MI30TI or MI30TE) It is $10/month for 30GB with auto-pay. Then get an unlocked phone and put in the T-Mobile Sim card and activate the hotspot (or via USB tethering since Wifi is too complicated for them). Although, I am not sure how you would limit the speed down to 56k to prevent them from going over the 30GB limit.

jandrese 1y ago
The caveat with this is that many people on dialup are the ones who live too far from civilization to get cell coverage. The only reason they have phone service at all is government incentives in the mid 20th century.
- coolspot 1y ago
  For that case, Starlink is $10/m for 10GB, $50/m for 50GB or $80/m for unlimited (fixed location).

yonaguska 1y ago

I used it in boarding school as a proxy tunnel that actually worked. It was too slow to do anything useful, but, I had bought napoleon total war, and the network blocked whatever DRM it was using to allow me to play. I ended up bypassing it by simply using an aol disc. I ended up pirating the game I had paid for later simply bc it was too much of a pain to keep using AOL.

MarkusWandel 1y ago

Dialup became useless long ago because of web bloat. My mom had a rural dialup connection that typically managed about 30kbps. 15+ years ago this was enough to load Facebook, Gmail (even without its fallback basic html mode which is gone now anyway) and so on. You just had to be patient the first time while all the graphic assets got cached. Some years later she was on a cell network connection with 128kbps fallback if you go over your limit. Hey, 4x as fast as she had before, effectively unlimited right? Wrong. Bloat was by now such that sites simply wouldn't load at 128kbps. Things timed out before all the bloat was loaded and you would not get the UI regardless how patient you were. Hacker News still worked of course.

jonbiggums22 1y ago
Had a similar experience. I grew up in a rural area and broadband penetration was late. Later when I bought a house I was lied to by comcast about availability and ended up dialup again. (My fault for believing them tbh) Most of the tricks I used to make the most out of a dialup connection (disable images, disable flash player, load multiple pages so they could be browsed offline) didn't make a difference anymore. In the case of loading multiple pages, lazy loading meant this didn't really work. It was a much more brutal experience than the first go around. The worst part was how little actual content actually makes up the bloat. Sure video was right out, but I was often struggling to load pages that were mostly text. The only other option at the time was Hugesnet. After doing the math I determined the data caps were so low dialup was actually cheaper at MBs/month and had less latency issues. Realistically the next best available step up wasn't Hughesnet it was shotgunned 56K.
- RiverCrochet 1y ago
  A firm I used to do network work for had Hughesnet as failover Internet for a couple locations. I always knew they were on it by the 500ms+ pings. Better than nothing though for sure. And I'd also believe that's typical of any non-Starlink Internet around the end of the 2010s.
  - MarkusWandel 1y ago

lousken 1y ago

Downloading 200MB Windows 98 update was the adrenaline back then.

freedomben 1y ago
For me it was downloading mp3 files and only letting Winamp play them on repeat as they download. At first you just got a second or two of sound, and it would add maybe a second on each play. Eventually the magic of compound interest would get you the whole song, and that was a major adrenaline rush
sys_64738 1y ago
I remember downloading IE4 over a phone line at the inlaws. It took hours for a few MB. It was worse if I recall as I already had broadband via Road Runner back then (1998).

em3rgent0rdr 1y ago

Imagine the final dial-up.

jlarocco 1y ago

As much crap as AOL used to get, there's not much difference between their chat in 1996 and Teams and Slack now. And it managed to do it with 8 Mb of RAM over a 14.4k modem. Of course it didn't have video, but the group chat itself was basically the same. In some ways, tech progress has been pretty disappointing.

Hobadee 1y ago
Except that the AIM protocol was reverse-enginnereed and you could then use a single client (GAIM/Pidgeon, Trillian) to talk to all your friends. The protocols nowadays are so locked down that there has yet to be a decent 3rd party implementation.
- Melatonic 1y ago
  Loved Trillian
- jlarocco 1y ago
  The AOL chat rooms were different than AIM. From the chat room you could open instant messages to specific people, and that one-on-one chat eventually became AIM. For one-on-one messaging, the 3rd party clients were often better, but I don't remember any 3rd party clients for the chat rooms. I only used them from the AOL application itself.
burntwater 1y ago
The sound effects were way better back then. "You've got mail!". The doors opening/closing. Though maybe it's different because back then, then meant someone I wanted to interact with was now available. Today, a chat sound means someone I probably don't want to, but am required to, interact with is now available.
- BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  I had a thought a couple of days ago about the flood of emails and notifications that we enjoy the privilege of these days and came to the conclusion that, the value of the notification has a direct relationship with he amount of effort that went into creating it and the number of recipients it's destined for. The effort that goes into a bulk email is divided by the number of recipients, and therefore its value to me rounds down to zero. The value of an email that's manually written by management (or an assistant at the direction of management) that goes to all staff or my team is divided by the size of it's distribution list. Higher than zero value. An email sent to me by a friend or colleague to ask a question or organise a meeting or get together has a high value because I'm the only recipient; it was specifically for me. We need a method to rank these things, and then we need to personally choose some minimum floor at which notifications will 'ping' on our chosen device.

tombert 1y ago

A small part of me has debated artificially limiting my internet speeds to 56k, to see how well I could actually live with dial-up speeds. If I did everything with w3m and Mutt and whatnot, I could see myself living almost comfortably.

throwzasdf 1y ago
Enable Chrome Developer Tools, you can choose the simulated speed to test.
- tombert 1y ago
  yeah but that wouldn't work with Mutt and w3m.
somat 1y ago
I run an openbsd firewall and was able to setup queues to limit connection speed. I mainly use it to banish iot devices to the shadow realm. (connectivity detection appears to work but it is slow enough that nothing really gets done) If not on obsd the logic is usually the same, just read up on how your router implements fair service queues. queue base0 on em0 bandwidth 100M max 100M queue full parent base0 flows 128 bandwidth 100M qlimit 128 default queue limited parent base0 flows 128 bandwidth 1K max 1K qlimit 128 match in on em1 queue limited Another fun shadow realm technique is to see how much packet loss the device can tolerate with a rule like block in on em1 probability 20% But this tends to trip the connectivity detector.

1024core 1y ago

I remember a few years (OK, more than a few) ago, ATT decided to discontinue renting out touchtone phones. It seems once upon a time, people paid ATT something like $5/mo to rent this new-fangled "touch tone" technology. And there were like a million people in California regularly paying ATT (or PacBell or whoever inherited ATTs customers) $60/year to rent a phone that you could buy outright for $10 in your local Walgreens or Walmart.

xunil2ycom 1y ago
To be fair, that was a holdover from when AT&T held a monopoly on phones via Western Electric. Some folks probably just didn't bother changing out their phone after the divestiture.
aidenn0 1y ago
It used to violate your customer agreement with ma bell to connect any personally owned equipment to the phone lines. My first phone was a bakelite pulse-dialing phone that had the ringer clipped, because they used to measure the number of extensions by the resistance on the ringer circuit (this was well after that requirement was quashed by the courts, but it was a phone I inherited).
spauldo 1y ago
Touch-tone service charge was still a thing in the 90s at Southwestern Bell. My grandpa told 'em he didn't want it because all his phones were still rotary, so they removed the charge. Turned out that they didn't actually have rotary-only service. My aunt got a princess phone for Christmas and I plugged it in for her with the touch-tone switch on. She could dial out just fine.

xunil2ycom 1y ago

The article mentions AOL CDs being ubiquitous. I remember the 3.5 in floppies before the CDs. At least one could put something in the write protect hole and reformat them. The CDs ended up as so much garbage.

whoomp12342 1y ago

I wish they could mail this article on a free CD behind a paywall...

pcdoodle 1y ago

The killer feature of dialup these days would be email. Let it connect, download the attachments, free up the phone line.

tech234a 1y ago

Still available from MSN for the time being: https://get.msn.com/ https://get.msn.com/

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Still remember when AOL cut our internet after I got spicy at 9 years old because I was mad at my cousin. Mom was very unhappy. We got internet back, but I wasnt allowed on for months. Lots of memories there. I remember getting into Star Craft and my sister logged in from Puerto Rico which would disconnect me in Florida almost all the time. I really hated when my sister did this, so I borrowed my friends AOL login info, he was online way less than me.

JSR_FDED 1y ago

I remember going from ATDP to ATDT… just one letter but I felt I was living in the future :-)

keith82 1y ago

I do IT stuff for a local pizza chain. They are still on an ancient Linux POS system. With dumb terminals using PS/2 keyboards with 3 rows of function keys for buttons for every pizza topping and such. I’ve kept them running cloning the old drives to compact flash cards and IDE readers. However to get the software license blessed again it requires the sole developer who lives in Thailand now to ssh in over dial up.

slow_typist 1y ago
OMG how can you do business like that, depending on a sole developer. Ever thought of cracking the software?

can16358p 1y ago

I'm actually surprised that it still existed anyway. Dial-up (not AOL but anyway) nostalgia: I remember the excitement of waiting for hours to download a simple file and watching it go 98%, 99% and 100% as connection drops were frequent and many servers didn't support resuming downloads at that era meaning you had to start over if it failed at any point. I also remember switching from dial up to a blazingly fast 512 Kbps ADSL, which sometimes (probably due to a bug in ISP) became an "unbelievably fast" 2048 Kbps line, downloading files around 200 KB/s which seemed futuristic. Good old times.

nashashmi 1y ago
AOL Dial up was quite profitable for a long time. And was the basis of selling aol desktop.
epolanski 1y ago
I remember my first "wow, I downloaded an mp3 song faster than I can listen it" with ADSL.

sans_souse 1y ago

Those dial-up sounds are pure nostalgia. It's amazing when you consider loading a .jpg used to occur gruellingly slow on dial-up, and downloading a 5mb file might take hours. Now we stream HD video without (much) hiccup even on slow fiber, cable etc.

noufalibrahim 1y ago

So many pieces of the internet being discontinued. A little nostalgic but I don't really see the point in keeping dial up alive anymore. When I was first exposed to the net, I used an email to http proxy. It was called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(web_browser) and you sent a certain email address emails with requests for pages, posting to forms etc. Then walked away and came back and checked your inbox for responses. It was quirky but I did get some documentation and largish poster of Steve Vai back in the day using this which was kind of cool I guess. I sent so many emails (first from pine and then from mutt) that I remember the email address by heart. agora@dna.affrc.go.jp

FerretFred 1y ago

I went through a phase a couple of years ago where I was setting up my Linux Thinkpad T480 with every accessory I could find. My heart leapt with joy when I found an affordable USB-modem dongle and was excited to try it out. TBH the only service I could find was a US-based fax service but that worked really well. Sadly, all the BBSs I'd hoped to try out had long since converted to Telnet, but hey, it was cool to think that if I ever needed to dialup anything I could actually do it

timbit42 1y ago

My first modem was the 300 baud VIC Modem Commodore made for the Commodore VIC-20. It was supposed to be the first modem for under $100 which they achieved by not having those rubber cups for the receiver. Instead, it plugged directly into the wall. Years later I found out the first modems were 110 baud. I bought the VIC Modem second hand but the only thing I could connect to was another friend who had a modem. We transferred some files but decided it was faster to drive over to his house with a disk and then drive back. I also tried connecting to a data service listed in the yellow pages, and the modem would connect, but then I couldn't get it to do anything. The service was listed as being free but I didn't realize it was a long distance call to connect to it and that wasn't free so my parents ended up with an $80 long distance bill from my modem calls. Then I had a 1200 baud modem Commodore made for the Commodore 64. Again, I was only able to connect with other friends who had a modem. When I got my Amiga 2000, I set up a BBS (FidoNet 1:255/42) with a SupraModem 2400. Later they had a deal for sysops to get their new 14,400 modem. I can't remember if it was buy-one-get-one-free, or buy-one-get-one-half-price. I only had one phone line so I sold the second one to a friend who used my BBS the most. At least someone could benefit from my having 14,400. I also remember playing Battle Chess over the modem with a friend who had a PC clone. We were playing one day and my mom called me to supper so I set Battle Chess on my Amiga to autoplay while I was eating. When I came back my friend had no idea I had left. Good laugh. I think I had a 33,600 next and then finally a 56K before moving to a city where they were testing HFC internet which was hybrid-fibre-coax around 1997 and was 10 Mbit/s both up and down. It was screaming fast compared to dialup and I could download a CD ISO in under 20 seconds while my friend back home were still downloading ISO images via dialup. (Just did the math and it should only take 8 to 9 seconds, so I guess there was a bottleneck somewhere).

timbit42 1y ago

In 1997 I got a job at a college where only the college administrators had internet and it was via WinProxy and a modem on my desktop PC. They were paying for a number of ISP email addresses. They also had a static website hosted elsewhere on a pre-OSX Mac. I was able to propose spending $1,000 on a web/email server and putting in a 56K ISDN line for a lower monthly cost. This also gave them full control over their web server to write PHP and use MySQL. It also allowed every staff member to have an email on their own domain and web access. We also put Squid proxy on the server to cache some of the web browsing. It worked well. Later when we were able to upgrade to DSL, we also added the computer lab to the internet. Fun times.

NtG_UK 1y ago

My first “modem” was this fantastically beige 300-baud hand-me-down acoustic coupler from 1984: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13106/Epson-CX-21-Acoustic-Coupler/ https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13106/Epson-CX-21-Ac... A family friend came round and used it to hook up my Atari ST to a local BBS. Mind-blowing. I got a brief glimpse of the future that day. Local calls not being free, I wasn’t allowed to repeat the experiment until we signed up for MSN in 1996. Didn’t stop younger me switching on the acoustic coupler with no computer attached and trying “communicate” with it by making “shhhh” noises into the cups :D