Gen Z loves retro stuff, like wired headphones and old-school cameras. But if they ever want to try ’90s-style Internet, it just got a little bit tougher. AOL announced their dial-up Internet service is shutting down. Yes, it was still an option in 2025.
It’s how a lot of Americans first accessed the Internet in the 1990s. Back then, it was called “America Online”. They shortened it to AOL in 2006.
It worked through your telephone line, and you heard a series of loud SCREECHING sounds when you logged on. The other drawback was you had to log off if your parents had to make a phone call.
Everyone used to get America Online CDs in the mail offering free trial memberships. The first 100 hours were free, and then you had to pay.
Broadband and wireless eventually lapped dial-up and made it mostly obsolete. According to Census data, 160,000 Americans were still using dial-up in 2023. That’s around 0.1% of all internet connections in the U.S.
AOL put out a statement saying it “routinely evaluates its products and services” and decided to discontinue dial-up Internet on September 30th.
It doesn’t mean dial-up is totally dead. If you enjoy waiting 15 minutes for websites to load, Microsoft, NetZero, and a few other companies still offer it.
It’s mainly used by people in remote areas, where the only other option is satellite internet. Dial-up is cheap, like $10 a month or less, because it’s VERY slow by today’s standards. It tops out at 56 kilobits per second. So, it would take about 12 minutes to download a song. And a high-def movie would take around 170 hours, or just over a week.
R.I.P., America Online. We got mail. So, thanks for that.
(Here’s a video that shows what logging on in the ’90s was like.)
