AOL's dial up internet takes its last bow, marking the end of an era
apnews.com
It’s official: AOL’s dial-up internet has taken its last bow. The company confirmed it would discontinue the service on Tuesday, September 30th, citing routine evaluations of its offerings.
  • TwinTitans@lemmy.worldEnglish
    232·
    15 days ago

    I’d rather go back to using the internet that dial up was used for than this high speed cesspool we have now.

    • Psythik@lemmy.worldEnglish
      33·
      15 days ago

      Nah, I don’t miss forums and chat rooms enough to go back to those days again. I need my comments to be sorted by uovote count to preserve my sanity. I can’t go back. People are assholes.

  • robocall@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    15 days ago

    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.

    Are these households in rural areas without many alternatives?

    Starlink is available in the vast majority of the US. What is the cost difference though?

    edit: i dont like elon musk or starlink

    • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      15 days ago

      New retirement gig: Fill the gap in the market for super-rural dialup.

      It’d be like the new version of a rural post office. I could actually be a lineman for the county!

    • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      15 days ago

      There are other legacy satellite providers like hughesnet that are somehow still hanging on. They don’t really hold a candle to starlink performance-wise, and they shit the bed in bad weather, but at least they’re not Elon. There’s going to be a lot of latency, but it’ll feel blazing fast if you’re coming from dialup.

      There are other dialup providers still remaining as well, besides AOL. I know msn is still kicking at least. It’s kind of funny to think about receiving dialup service when almost all POTS lines have gone away, and much of the modern web will be borderline unusable without lots of tweaking, but at least grandma who lives out in the sticks can check her email, use chat clients, download articles and books, etc.

  • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    15 days ago

    Anyone still using dial up as a back-channel solution? Never implemented that myself, but seemed a cheap and easy way to get into your remote network in case of fuck up or outage. Banks used to do it. Anyone know?