AOL played a role in the nascent internet service provider market. This week, after more than 30 years, it officially went belly up and shut down its national dial-up service. This decision heralds the end of an era. From the day this valuable service was launched years ago, it has injected millions of reliable and free users into the internet on the connected side. As of 2023, fewer than 300,000 people in the United States, or 0.2 percent of the population, use only a dial-up connection. In sharp contrast, today broadband services reach more than 300 million users nationwide.
AOL’s ascendance started with AOL 2.0 in the mid-90s, growing to the point that AOL was a household name due to their ubiquitous marketing campaign. The firm lured customers with colorful fliers advertising free trial discs, an irresistible way to dip your toes into the online world. At its height, AOL ruled the internet landscape. It captured ~40% of all time Americans spent online establishing its continued dominance in the fledgling digital space.
The company’s dial-up service allowed users to connect to the internet via their existing phone line. This approach has for years been left in the dust by download-oriented, high-speed broadband connections. By 2003, policy wonks predicted that dial-up service was doomed. Just two months later, a Wall Street Journal article—making a pretty big leap based on these numbers—proclaimed flatly, “It’s official. Dial-up is dying.” The transition away from this technology in many ways mirrored the wider shifts in consumer tastes and rapid progress in internet infrastructure.
In popular culture, AOL’s start-up sound—a distinctive chirpy whirring noise—became iconic, famously memorialized in the 1998 film “You’ve Got Mail.” This retro sound brought back all the feels to everyone who remembers the clunky days of dial-up internet.
Now owned by private equity firm Apollo Global, AOL still exists and operates alongside Yahoo as part of its corporate empire. While this move may seem contradictory given the company’s historic influence in this realm, Google has proven that it understands the evolving internet landscape.
AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. – AOL
This decision is a fresh, unequivocal prospect… A clear recognition that the dial-up era internet service is no longer acceptable in an age of speed and connectivity. Broadband technology has recently dominated the telecommunications industry. AOL’s recent announcement that it will stop providing dial-up service to the last of its users underscores this huge change.