AOL confirmed the shutdown date in a message of help to customers: “AOL regularly evaluates its products and services and has decided to stop Internet Dial-Up. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans.”
Together with the Dial-Up service, AOL announced that his Aol Dialer software and the Aol Shield browser on the same date will retire. The Dialer software managed the connection process between computers and AOL network, while Shield was a web browser optimized for slower connections and older operating systems.
Aol’s Dial-Up service was launched as “America Online” in 1991 as a closed commercial online service, with dial-up roots that extend again to Quantum connection For computers Commodore in 1985. However, AOL has not yet provided effective Internet access: the possibility of browsing the web, accessing newsgroups or using services such as GoPher launched in 1994. Before then, AOL users could only access the content hosted on AOL servers.
When AOL finally opened its doors on the internet in 1994, the websites were measured in Kilobyte, the images were small and tablets and the video was essentially impossible. The AOL service grew next to the web itself, reaching a peak of over 25 million subscribers in the early 2000s before the broadband adoption accelerated its decline.
According to the data of the US census of 2022, About 175,000 American families However, connect to the internet through dial-up services. These users generally live in rural areas where large bandwidth infrastructure does not exist or remains prohibitively expensive to install.
For these users, alternatives are limited. Satellite internet now serves between 2 million and 3 million US subscribers have divided between various services, offering speeds far but often with the highest data and latency limits. Traditional broadband through DSL connections, cables or optical fibers is needed the vast majority of US internet users but requires infrastructure investments that do not always have an economic sense in poorly populated areas.
The persistence of the dial-up highlights the ongoing digital division in the United States. While urban users enjoy Gigabit fiber connections, some rural residents still rely on the same technology that has fueled the internet of 1995. Also basic tasks such as the loading of a modern web page, designed with the intake of large broadband speed-take a few minutes on a dial-up connection or sometimes it does not work at all.
The gap between dial-up and modern internet connections is stunning. A typical Dial-up connection supplied 0.056 Megabit per second, while today’s average fiber connection provides 500 Mbps, almost 9,000 times faster. To put this in perspective, downloading a single high resolution photo that is instantly loaded on broadband would require several minutes on the dial-up. A film that broadcasts in real time flow on Netflix would take download days. But for millions of Americans who have lived the era of the dial-up, these statistics tell only a part of the story.
The sound of the first Internet
For those who came online before broadband, the dial-up meant a specific ritual: click on the button to compose, listen to the modem to compose a local access number, then listen to the Distinctive sequence of the handshake—A cacophony of static, acoustic signals and hiss that indicated that your computer was negotiating a connection with AOL servers. Once connected, users paid for now or through monthly plans that offered limited access hours.
The 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 online, leading to countless family disputes in the internet time. The fastest consumption modem have exceeded 56 Kilobit per second in ideal conditions.
Be First to Comment