AOL Suts Down Dial-up Internet Service after Three Decades

Dial-up internet will be shut down by the end of September for AOL customers. American online service provider America Online (AOL), now part of Yahoo, released a statement this week saying that it will “discontinue dial-up internet” at the end of September after evaluating its products and services.

That includes AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which work on older operating systems and dial-internet connections, the company said.

Remember dial-up internet? One of its biggest providers says it's time to retire the service - one of the first ways people could get online - after more than three decades.

AOL first launched dial-up in the United States in 1991. For many, it was the primary way to access the internet for years. A dial-up service uses a telephone line to connect a computer to the internet. A computer would use a modem to place a phone call to an internet provider’s modem and, once answered, the two would then connect a computer to the internet.

The AOL dial-up service worked by launching an internet connection with a dial tone. If there were any issues with connecting, people were asked to unplug the other devices in their home and to restart their computer’s modem.

​​Media reports from the 1990s and early 2000s hailed AOL’s entrance to Europe 30 years ago, saying the company aimed to expand its grip on dial-up internet. AOL Europe had millions of subscribers, but it faced “stiff competition, pricing difficulties and strategic miscues,” Bloomberg reported in 2002.

Today, it is quite rare for people to continue using the 90s internet staple due to the expansion of broadband and mobile internet services.

In the European Union, approximately 2 percent of the population used dial-up to access the internet in 2018, the most recent year with data available, according to Eurostat.

That’s compared to the roughly 88 per cent of EU households that relied on broadband connections that year. That share rose to nearly 93 per cent in 2021.