AOL will close telephone access Internet in September

After decades of Connecting US subscribers to their online and internet service through telephone lines, AOL Recently announced Finally, it is closing its telephone access modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marks the end of a technology that served as the main entrance door to the web for millions of users throughout the 90s and early 2000s.

AOL confirmed the closing date in a customer help message: “AOL routinely evaluates their products and services and has decided to suspend telephone access Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans.”

Together with the telephone access service, AOL announced that it will withdraw its Aol Dialer software and the Aol Shield browser on the same date. The Dialer software managed the connection process between computers and the AOL network, while Shield was an optimized web browser for slower connections and older operating systems.

The AOL telephone access service was launched as “America online” in 1991 as a closed online commercial service, with telephone access roots that extend to Quantum link For Comodore Computers in 1985. However, AOL did not yet provide real Internet access: the ability to navigate the web, access news groups or use services such as Gopher launched in 1994. Before that, AOL users could only access the content hosted on AOL servers themselves.

When AOL finally opened its doors to the Internet in 1994, websites were measured in Kilobytes, the images were small and compressed, and the video was essentially impossible. The AOL service grew together with the web itself, reaching its maximum point in more than 25 million subscribers in the early 2000s before the adoption of broadband accelerated its decline.

According to the US census data. UU. 2022, Approximately 175,000 American homes It still connects to the Internet through telephone access services. These users generally live in rural areas where broadband infrastructure does not exist or remains prohibitively expensive to install.

For these users, the alternatives are limited. Satellite Internet now serves between 2 million and 3 million American subscribers are divided between several services, offering speeds that exceed telephone access, but often with data limits and greater latency. Traditional broadband through DSL connections, cable or fiber optic serves the vast majority of US Internet users, but requires infrastructure investments that do not always have economic sense in scarcely populated areas.

The persistence of telephone access highlights the ongoing digital division in the United States. While urban users enjoy Gigabit fiber connections, some rural residents still depend on the same technology that promoted the Internet of 1995. Even basic tasks such as the loading of a modern website, designed with the assumption of broadband velocities, can take minutes on a telephone access connection, or sometimes it does not work at all.

The gap between telephone access and modern Internet connections is amazing. A typical telephone access connection delivered 0.056 megabits per second, while today’s average fiber connection provides 500 Mbps, almost 9,000 times faster. To put this in perspective, download a single high resolution photo that is instantly charged in broadband would take several minutes in telephone access. A film that is transmitted in real time in Netflix would require download days. But for millions of Americans who lived the telephone era, these statistics only tell a part of the story.

The sound of the first Internet

For those who connected before broadband, telephone access meant a specific ritual: click on the dial button, listen to your modem mark a local access number and then listen to the Distinctive hands sequence—A cacophony of static and whistles that indicated that their computer was negotiating a connection with the AOL servers. Once connected, users pay per hour or through monthly plans that offered limited access hours.

Technology worked by converting digital data into audio signals that traveled on standard telephone lines, originally designed in the nineteenth century for voice calls. This meant that users could not receive phone calls while they were online, which led to innumerable family disputes during the Internet. The fastest consumption modems exceeded 56 kilobits per second in ideal conditions.