More than thirty years after bringing the Internet to regular people, AOL (aka, “America Online”) is discontinuing its dial-up service on September 30 – and it will likely hit people in rural areas the hardest.
News media picked up the story, pointing to a page on the AOL help site titled, “Dial-up Internet to be discontinued,” which read:
AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.
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.
For more information or if you have questions about your account, call:
U.S. – 1-888-265-5555
Canada – 1-888-265-4357
Ars Technica, citing 2022 US Census data, reported that approximately 175,000 American households still connect to the Internet through dial-up services. “These users typically live in rural areas where broadband infrastructure doesn’t exist or remains prohibitively expensive to install.”
For those users, alternatives are limited, the publication said – satellite Internet offers faster speeds than dial-up but often with data caps and higher latency, while infrastructure investments for traditional broadband “don’t always make economic sense in sparsely populated areas.”
While 175,000 households may not sound like a lot, it makes sense that those are people who may rely on online shopping the most.
In its coverage, Wired wrote, “The persistence of dial-up highlights the ongoing digital divide in the United States. While urban users enjoy gigabit fiber connections, some rural residents still rely on the same technology that powered the internet of 1995. Even basic tasks like loading a modern webpage—designed with the assumption of broadband speeds—can take minutes over a dial-up connection, or sometimes it doesn’t work at all.”