Goodbye
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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TIL that AOL is still a thing.
Lol beat me to it!
I speed limited my kids internet to 56kbps to make them go do chores. At first they complained that it broke everything. Later they were finding the most text based sites and waiting for them to load. They learnt and adapted.
accidentally turning your kids into Web 1.0 enjoyers lol
Time to fire up Protoweb!
They discovered patience that I never knew they had in them.
Honestly? That's pretty fucking brilliant.
I'm totally stealing this, thanks!
Is anyone still using dial-up?
In the U.S., according to Census Bureau data, an estimated 163,401 households were using dial-up alone to get online in 2023, representing just over 0.13% of all homes with internet subscriptions nationwide.
(AP News)
As far as US households, looks like not many. Most likely very remote locations. I had also read that some businesses maintain a dial up connection as a backup for broadband outages
It's funny that the US still has dial-up. In the Netherlands the last dial-up provider stopped their service on oktober 1st 2021, and that was already late.
If Netherlands was a US state it would be ranked 42/50 in area. We have zero-population zones larger than your whole country. Our government refused to spend taxpayer money properly on telecom infrastructure since the 1990s so some of us are stuck here with Pony Express internet, it’s awful.
Oh and now our corrupt gov wants to eliminate “wasteful” fiber in exchange for Musk becoming a trillionaire with Starlink. Lovely.
Add in the fact when Comcast got subsidies to improve infrastructure they fucked off with the money and never got punished for it.
That's horrible, I got fiber at home 1GB up and down. How can you expect a country to be at the top of things when you don't invest.
By sabotaging all the other countries that are dependent on our corporations. The problem is that most of our corporations don't even make anything anymore, so everyone is starting to get wise
You’re comparing very different sizes geographically. This chart seems to indicate that around 2015 there were about 1.6 billion miles or 2.5 billion kilometers of telephone wire deployed across the US. Running fiber or coax across the same distances is costly. Electricity and telephone service reached just about every house in the 1930s because the government paid for it as part of Depression-era spending, then declared that these items were necessary utilities that must be provided to new homes and businesses constructed later. A lot of the telecom companies were hoping to get the government to do that again. There have been some bills providing government money for these, but the telecom companies have been trying to take the money but do the bare minimum or only roll out wireless service, and the government has been slow providing funding. Meanwhile SpaceX has been trying to say they should get the money instead because they can get everyone online faster and their low orbit constellation doesn’t have the latency issues of the satellite internet traditionally available to rural customers. I think they cancelled the money that had been awarded and gave it to SpaceX back when Musk was running the government this spring. And of course, none of the companies want the Internet classified as a utility because then they have to provide equal access to everything instead of trying to slow access to Netflix unless Netflix pays them.
Ok, the only country in Europe currently still using dial up is Croatia, the rest of Europe has shutdown those services years ago. Telephone wires have been used for aDSL since the early 2000s and stil used for vDSL but dial up?
Again, Europe is far more densely populated than the US. The EU's population density is 106/km², the US is 37. The least dense country is Finland with 16/km², but they're a rich country with not a large population so it's not surprising for them to not have dial up. Runner up is Sweden with 24 but they are yet again a rich country. For context, there are 10 states in the US that have a smaller population density than Finland. Combine this with the US not having that good of public infrastructure because they mostly have private everything, I don't find it surprising at all that Europe doesn't have dial-up and the US does.
I wonder how many of those 164k are people who are still being billed for a service they no longer use.
It's right in the subheading, first thing.
And the article.
There is probably still a bunch of old people with a dialup subscription that they never canceled.
This, tbh. I did not have this on my 2025 bingo card...
So the eternal september finally ends.
RIP, I still remember getting those AOL CDs in the mail, and was so excited by the concept of a disk that could allow me to connect to the world wide web.
My big turn on for AOL is all you needed was a checking account and bam you were in. No credit card required. You still ran out of minutes way too fast.
I remember the 3.5" floppy disks saying "200 free hours!"
I remember drilling out the the write protect hole so I could reuse them. Floppies were expensive and I was broke as a teenager, I loved aol disks.
My uncle would take me to computer shows and your could grab a 50 pack of those floppies shrink wrapped. I might even have a few still floating around in my computer junk drawer.
I use some as coasters.
YOU'VE GOT MAIL!
Quick, before it's gone <<
I can still hear that voice in my head saying it, along with "goodbye!"
I think the biggest surprise for me is that there's still anywhere in the country with genuine actual POTS lines. I thought the Plain Old Telephone Service was dead and that those places that still had phone numbers were six feet of phone line to a VoIP converter box to an internet connection.
Just before my mother retired as a school secretary, she was telling me all the hell they had to go through to keep a fax machine running in the age of IP telephony.
Wire is pretty much never removed once it's laid out and I'm sure a lot of DSL based internet connections still run over same twisted pair that would have carried POTS lines.
But you're probably right that there's a VoIP device keeping these up and working, maybe just more than 6 ft away and instead in some Telco box down the street.
I think POTS installations will remain for decades more in niche cases - emergency backups in elevators, security systems, hospitals, fire departments. And evidently Grandma's AOL internet connection up until this month haha
I’m honestly impressed that it’s still a thing