RIP AOL: End of an era as early internet giant turns off dial-up

You will have to be of a certain age to feel a pang of nostalgia when listening to an array of beeps and boops with a few ear-percing screeches thrown in, but you’ll know exactly what you’re listening to if you once connected to the internet using dial-up technology.

The 1990s ushered the internet into homes around the world, with our telephone lines acting as portals to a new place we could all go - online. Now, after 34 years, one of the original internet giants is finally ditching its dial-up service, but it might be more surprising to you to learn it still exists.

AOL, which stands for America Online, is discontinuing its dial-up internet service for customers in the US and Canada. Offshoot AOL UK packed up shop a long time ago on these shores after Carphone Warehouse purchased the firm in 2006, though the brand lives on in legacy email addresses and still allows you to sign up for an account.

But customers across the pond who might never have switched to more modern broadband connections will finally be left with no choice as AOL will turn off all dial-up connections on September 30, 2025.

Dial-up technology used standard telephone lines to access the internet, which was great in 1995 as websites were much simpler and the web and email were mostly text-based. Nowadays, dial-up would struggle to load websites and play video given the volume of data needed to do these things.

Dial-up’s average data speeds can reach 56 kilobytes per second, which would take one day, 15 hours and 40 minutes to download a 1GB file. According to UK regulator Ofcom, the UK's average broadband speed in 2025 is 223 Mbps, which could download the same file in less than 36 seconds.

“AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet,” AOL said on its website.

“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.”

AOL became a household name in the US and the UK thanks to its popular web and email services and portals, though their functionality seems antiquated in 2025. Some AOL products didn’t let you visit all types of websites, when companies were still working out what the World Wide Web could be, and tried to silo users into only using their services.

AOL was also popularised by the 1998 Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan film “You’ve Got Mail”, where the characters send love letters to each other using AOL email.

The firm AOL as it now exists is owned by Yahoo, itself still prominent for some web users but compared to companies such as Microsoft and Google, today a fallen titan of the early internet era.