AOL closes its dial up internet service
87 comments
·August 10, 2025MalbertKerman
Quekid5
Eternal September is repeating itself.
akoster
Nice Eternal September reference:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended...
setsewerd
I didn’t realize Billie Joe Armstrong was such a big Usenet fan, but the song makes more sense now
AbstractH24
Internet innocence is now truly in the past.
gnabgib
Discussion (177 points, 2 days ago, 90 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843369
echelon
There was a mention of EarthLink in that thread. They still surprisingly have a very large office building in Atlanta.
They've also recently discontinued dialup.
soupfordummies
I guess they’re only commercial, right? I’ve tried to get them at every place I’ve lived in Atl and they’ve never been available. A lot of places you don’t even get to choose between Comcast/at$t - it’s one or the other.
rco8786
I'm just happy to be in the Google fiber service area
DarkFuture
Dial up was a painful period, sitting in school Monday-Friday thinking about what I'm going to surf in the weekend because that was the only time it was available for the package my parents had in 1998/1999 here in UK. Counting down the hours on Friday evening until it hits 12:00am.
acomjean
Yeah. I think you got 6 hours a month (or something). One other aspect I didn’t like was when using and my hosemates picked up the phone I’d get disconnected, they’d be annoyed.
101008
Similar experience but I think it made me value more my time online. That felt better. Now I'm online all the time!
em-bee
interesting, because somewhere around the time that i was able to use dialup i learned to value how i spend my time. i don't know if it had anything to do with limited dialup time. however now limited online time causes more problems because it causes me to prioritize unimportant online activities, whereas when i have unlimited online access, it is easier to prioritize important activities because i can always do the online stuff later.
qingcharles
I first got on with Demon in '93. I remember a £1000 phone bill and a lot of trouble.
mrandish
I'd love to know what AOL's dial-up MAU for July 2025 was. I still remember when the first consumer v.56 modems came out. They were expensive but it felt so fast. We were living in the future.
Taylor_OD
Me too. I had a grandparent with AOL dial up until about 5 years ago. I was shocked when I visited her house and realized it.
soganess
56k v.90/v.92
My entire youth was making that mistake! I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one.
etempleton
My understanding years ago was that the service was surviving off of people who thought they still needed the service to access the internet even if they had broadband or kept paying for it even if they weren’t using it. Not sure if that is true or was just speculation.
remlov
They definitely made more than a little money from this. For example, my ex–mother-in-law kept paying for AOL dial-up after she was already paying for AT&T DSL, thinking that was the only way she could keep using AOL. And yes, she would still log in through the AOL browser.
GLdRH
Sometimes an entertaining lie is better than a boring truth.
mtillman
Fear not HN: https://sdf.org/?dialup
user3939382
I love SDF. It’s been a reliable friend for over 20 years. I encourage everyone on HN to support them.
umanwizard
I’m amazed to learn this still existed in 2025.
naz
It was awful having to use AOL dialup in the UK. My parents used it (it was one of the few ISPs with freephone) so I was stuck with it. The problem was AOL routed all traffic through Virginia. For someone in the UK that meant a minimum of ~130ms ping, ruining online games and making everything super slow
mickeyp
130ms ping with dialup was actually quite low. I suffered far higher with my dialup and it was a local isp.
giantrobot
For games I would have done awful things for a ping that low on dial-up. More typical for me was over 200ms. I did everything I could to tweak MTU and modem settings but could never break the 200ms barrier (that I remember).
sixothree
Routing through virginia persisted for a lot of ISPs well into the broadband days. Whatever could be the reason for that...
nly
What? No Freeserve?
pixelesque
Freeserve was free to buy, but you paid for it with the 0845 number (like with a lot of other ISPs in the late 90s) you had to dial.
seydor
I wouldn't do that. What if the swishy sounds of modems come back in fashion like vinyl players did.
lostlogin
I’ve got the sound as my ring tone. But my phone is usually on silent so I rarely get to hear it.
austinallegro
"You've got mail!.......It's not spam!"
RIP AOL dial up. Your free trial CD's provided many a day of comfort to my coffee mug over the years.
edm0nd
{s goodbye
ashleyn
What's going on everyone? +++ATH0
WD-42
I just owned you all with Methodus Toolz!!1
chrisco255
There's a great podcast about the old hacks and warez for AOL that interviews the developers, hackers, and AOL employees from that era: https://aolunderground.com/
edm0nd
I'm loading up my 1IM punter now
How fitting that it ends with September, whether that's September 30th, 2025 or September 11718th, 1993.