Dial-up Internet to be discontinued
47 comments
·August 9, 2025dlivingston
ack_complete
Apparently they just shut it down in 2024, but a couple of years ago I tested an Atari 1030 modem by dialing out to Earthlink, and it still worked -- successfully connected at 300 baud.
bobmcnamara
I worked somewhere with a small office run over Hughesnet. Some sort of upload-over-dial-up, broadband-download-over-satellite, with 1500ms latency for everything.
nosioptar
I know people just a couple hours from Seattle that still use dial up.
Most are older and don't want to spend the obscene prices for satellite, cellular signal isn't good enough out there.
nemomarx
The telecom hasn't tried to get them on DSL? There's subsidized low income programs for it (or where, idk what the status is now) so I can't imagine the cost was much higher. And if I were an ISP I might eat the cost of the upgrade just to avoid support complications for a small set of customers.
toast0
Around me, near Seattle, some of the DSLAMs are port limited. If you want DSL, you've got to wait for a port to open up.
chrisco255
I don't know how anyone can use the modern internet with dial up. It's got to be useless for all but email.
nosioptar
I think that's basically what they use it for.
Sites that work well with lynx are OK on dial up.
grishka
I'm sure HN is perfectly usable over dial-up as well.
dzhiurgis
Is dial up still at 56kbps?
chrisco255
Yes. It's a hard limit for old phone lines because they're limited to something like 3.1 khz.
esseph
Still over the phone lines, so yep. Extremely lucky if you get that on old copper though.
nosioptar
As far as I know.
(I haven't personally had dial up in about 20 tears.)
kylehotchkiss
3 million CD frisbee salute for our old friend (which pissed off our parents because we held up the phone like loading dynamic drive so they couldn’t call their sister)
t1234s
I didn't know AOL was still an ISP
tombert
My parents didn't have AOL when I was a kid; we had Prodigy, I think because they had promotions to get a cheap or free computer if you signed up for N years of Prodigy internet.
I was always kind of jealous of my friends who had AOL because I wanted the "You've Got Mail!" greeting, and I would see promotions that talk about "AOL Keywords" and I couldn't use those with Prodigy.
Amazing to think that AOL still offered dial-up service.
neilpomerleau
gregsadetsky
I like this explanatory graphic (after many many years of listening to the dialup sounds) - https://oona.windytan.com/posters/dialup-final.png
And this version combining the graphic and the sound used to make the graphic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo
And this alternative version (h/t @Kye): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpMrTxMV6E4
maxbond
Thanks for making that! Boy is that more annoying than I remembered.
twilightzone
That's subjective! I made a song with that sound in 1998. It was called "Net Pet" and it did pretty well on mp3.com.
firesteelrain
I’d just nod my head to the sound
apetresc
I didn't even know AOL was still around, let alone AOL dial-up.
800xl
I thought they were just a web portal and email service. It is amazing they still offered ISP services this long.
They had some pretty unscrupulous business practices back in the day with their free trial CD mailers. My cousin worked in their call center ages ago and would sometimes convince even people who didn't have a computer to pay for the service.
benchly
Do they still offer the floppies with the free hours? I need a new set of drink coasters.
loose-cannon
I wonder how quickly you can load some of the modern, popular, websites on a dial up connection.
sugarpimpdorsey
We have a whole generation of programmers that will justify 12MB of JavaScript bundles to output "Hello world".
null
duskwuff
Google homepage: two or three minutes
A Google SERP with rich content: about 20 minutes
A typical Facebook post: ten minutes
CNN home page: half an hour
YouTube: forget it
grishka
No need to wonder, just end up in an old building with thick brick walls that are only penetrated by a weak 2G signal and try to load something on your phone.
wtallis
Not possible anymore is many areas, where 2G and 3G networks have been shutdown to re-use spectrum for newer standards. The last time I was in a rural area with minimal signal strength, my phone was alternating between satellite-only messaging or 5G with 5-10 MB/s. I was actually able to download a movie in a quite reasonable amount of time, presumably because there wasn't anyone else doing much with the cell tower I was barely in range of.
philistine
You can test it yourself in the comfort of your gigabit connection. I wanted to test my barrage of very small images using lazy loading on a crappy connection. I learned that Chrome can easily pretend to suck. On Safari you somehow need to download a special tool but it works just as well.
Or as worse I guess.
tonetegeatinst
Do you know if Firefox or edge has a similar feature and if so what its called?
derwiki
This orange site is fine but I wouldn’t hold my breath on any others
benchly
Something low-resource demand (like my blog) would probably be okay, save for a few large pics on some pages. Most people who run in the smolweb circles also like vintage computing, so creating webspaces using only HTML & CSS is common practice, which should do fine over a 56k connection.
smelendez
I’d bet a lot of them are using old computers too, with who knows what browser and OS. It’s probably hard to tell loading issues from rendering issues
donio
Easy to see for yourself using the throttling option in the developer tools of popular browsers.
BobbyTables2
Page loading times would probably be measurable with a sundial or calendar.
danans
One wonders what the dial up ops department/team at AOL even looks like now. I wonder if it's anyone's full time job, or just something that occupies a fraction of their time.
freitasm
Some time ago there were estimates on the number of people still paying AOL but using a broadband service.
I wonder if AOL will stop charging people on dial-up only, or if they will later claim "oops, sorry..."
ricree
>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
Sounds like everyone keeps getting charged, since this is technically part of their "AOL plan", whatever that actually includes.
0xy
Benefits such as virus protection for email that you don't use, and a free AOL Toolbar with shopping offers you don't have installed. Thank you for your $10 a month you forgot we were charging you for 15 years.
JoshTriplett
Are there any sources indicating how many users dial-up still had?
orthecreedence
When I worked at AOL in 2010, dialup was their biggest source of revenue still. It'd be interesting to see the drop-off since then. I imagine it's trending down pretty quick as the generation using it kicks the bucket.
firesteelrain
There are older generations with aol.com email addresses including my MIL who despite being given multiple gmail addresses over the years still refuses to change and stop paying for it
alex1138
brrrrrrrrrrr
weeeeeeeeeee
kzzzzzzzzzzz
Kye
There's some good discussion on this recurring submission about the legendary dial-up process: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.windytan.com%2F20...
And a video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpMrTxMV6E4
I'm surprised it's still being offered period! My parents live in a remote area outside of a rural town in one of the USA's smaller states, and even they haven't had dial-up in ~15 years. We grew up with dial-up until about 2010, when they switched over to (absolutely terrible) satellite internet. HughsNet, I think it was called. Two-ish years ago they switched over to Starlink and it's been working well (when it does work, anyway).