AOL announces September shutdown for dial-up Internet access

After decades of connecting Americans to its online service and the Internet through telephone lines, AOL recently announced it is finally shutting down its dial-up modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marks the end of a technology that served as the primary gateway to the World Wide Web for millions of users throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

AOL confirmed the shutdown date in a help message to customers: "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."

Along with the dial-up service, AOL announced it will retire its AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser on the same date. The dialer software managed the connection process between computers and AOL's network, while Shield was a web browser optimized for slower connections and older operating systems.

AOL's dial-up service launched as "America Online" in 1991 as a closed commercial online service, with dial-up roots extending back to Quantum Link for Commodore computers in 1985. However, AOL didn't provide actual Internet access yet: The ability to browse the World Wide Web, access newsgroups, or use services like Gopher launched in 1994. Before then, AOL users could only access content hosted on AOL's own servers.

When AOL finally opened its gates to the Internet in 1994, websites were measured in kilobytes, images were small and compressed, and video was essentially impossible. The AOL service grew alongside the web itself, peaking at over 25 million subscribers in the early 2000s before broadband adoption accelerated its decline.

According to 2022 US Census data, 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 these users, the alternatives are limited. Satellite Internet now serves about 2 million–3 million US subscribers split between various services, offering speeds far exceeding dial-up but often with data caps and higher latency. Traditional broadband through DSL, cable, or fiber-optic connections serves the vast majority of US Internet users but requires infrastructure investments that don't always make economic sense in sparsely populated areas.