In just over a month, on September 30, AOL will shut down its dial-up service, forever. When this news was published a few weeks ago, the largest number of those who follow the news from IT world he was confused. Is it possible that at a time when practically every house has a hundred-megabit connection, someone is still using a beeping modem over a regular phone line and measuring access Internet on the hour, which was last widespread a quarter of a century ago. It turns out that there are about 130.000 such users in the US alone, according to a census from two years ago. And that their connection will not be completely cut off because at least three other providers still offer dial-up in some form.
Anyone who did not use the Internet in the last decade of the last century can hardly understand what the sound of the modem meant and how slow the transmission was compared to today. Here is an illustration. It took us 56 minutes to download an average three-minute song on the fastest dial-up modem, the 12K one. Today's internet connection does it in half a second. Anyone who wanted to transfer a movie to their computer at that time had to leave it running all night and in low resolution, blocking the phone line with a loud noise that drove the housemates crazy when they wanted to make calls. Today, we watch 4K movies in real time. There is hardly anyone who would return to those speeds due to some nostalgia, but all older people have some good anecdote related to the operation of modems from that era. Hardly comprehensible to anyone under, say, thirty-five.
Back to the previous question: Why would anyone use a dial-up modem today with all the amazing technology we have? There are several reasons, according to experts. First, the infrastructure. The modem is attached to a regular telephone line, we didn't need any other technology, except for a computer, of course. And the phone number on the other side that we called to establish contact with the network. They say that there are still households in the US that do not have a faster than telephone line, probably because it was not profitable for the providers. However, all this is bridged by mobile telephony today, so it is not expected that the abolition of analog lines for Internet access will really harm anyone except for the price.
But at a time when everyone had a telephone line, dial-up made it possible for everyone, even the most remote, to access the network, if only to exchange e-mail. Some didn't ask for more from the Internet, so they stuck to it, using services that offered ten hours of usage per month for a much lower fee (three to four times) than usual for broadband Internet. That meant twenty minutes a day to exchange mail, which is quite enough for a household or a small company or farm.
There are analysts who think that some businesses have kept dial-up as a backup option for communication. For example, if they were to lose power or broadband for any reason, they could access the network and send an important message using a laptop with an old-fashioned modem and a regular phone line, very slowly of course.
Abolishing dial-up service in 2025 means closing the door on the analog legacy of the digital revolution. Its shutdown is not just the end of a service, it is the closing of a chapter in the collective experience of the Internet, which is no longer remembered even by those who used it. But it also shows how quickly revolutionary technologies shape and leave our lives.
