Comment by hopelite
1 day ago
I’ve always wondered about the remaining users of the dial-up service. Who are they and what is the use case for using dial-up?
Does anyone know?
1 day ago
I’ve always wondered about the remaining users of the dial-up service. Who are they and what is the use case for using dial-up?
Does anyone know?
I had an elderly friend that still subscribed to AOL dialup until he died a couple of years ago. He had built his small business, which was very dependent on email, using an old AOL email address. The type of business he was in could involve old contacts suddenly appearing out of the blue again (via an email message) and so he wanted to maintain the AOL address to not lose that business.
Long ago, when AOL stopped requiring an AOL subscription to maintain an AOL email address, I advised him to cancel the AOL subscription. After explaining to me how important that exact address was to him he declined, stating that by paying the monthly fee he felt very assured the email address wouldn't go away and without paying for he felt like that assurance just wasn't there. So for years he knowingly paid for dialup he no longer actually used.
What type of business was it? Consulting?
He was a psychiatrist and did in-person corporate trainings on understanding and maximizing interpersonal communication in companies and teams. Myers-briggs types of things but I like to think his stuff was more valuable.
There are still a lot of people without access to broadband, or with only one provider which may be expensive.
https://www.benton.org/blog/more-third-americans-have-access...
Starlink is definitely increasing availability but it's somewhat expensive.
I have Starlink for my personal/family internet and AT&T DSL for my wife's work-from-home office. They are comparably priced.
What is really expensive is that AT&T wants a good $30k to build fiber out to my location. . . so I'm sticking with paying for two providers at the moment.
Probably people in rural areas that have limited access to other options. Starlink has probably absorbed most of that market, so no need to have dial up anymore.
Starlink is so much more expensive though, more than a lot of people in rural areas can afford.
Dialup could be had for very cheap last time I had if (big if) you had availability of cellular internet that is probably just as cheap now. However, the landline I had for dialup back in the day had become outright ridiculous in price by the time I convinced my wife we should cancel it (she liked that it worked when the power was out). It seems they don't even want to sell that service anymore.
VoIP is cheap but you need internet for VoIP and I'm not actually sure you could connect a modem to a VoIP even if it wasn't nonsensical.
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You would be surprised how much people in extremely rural areas are being gouged for really crappy internet.
I have a place less than an hour from Denver and without Starlink there are many, many people on extremely bad, oversubscribed 1Mbit DSL at the end of some gnarly POPs.
There are sometimes local ISPs that provide p2p wifi in extremely limited areas (see: rich neighborhoods) and its fine but for 20/10 you're paying similar prices or more than Starlink for something that's less reliable.
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Cellular internet. Edit: I'm not saying it's a good replacement for dialup, just that I have observed that many cell phone carriers are advertising plans for it now.
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I had an aunt who was a hold out until this past year. She was in a rather wooded and sparsely populated area and although faster internet became available awhile ago it was much more expensive and she was already used to the limitations of dial-up so she didn't feel compelled to make the jump. If she really needed fast internet for some reason (maybe emailing an attachment) she would drive to the nearest library.
Probably people who have had a recurring payment set up since 1995 and never questioned what they're paying $23.99 per month for the last 30 years for.
I know at least two people who are still paying for an AOL dial-up subscription despite not using because they use an @aol email address and think it will be discontinued if they don't continue to pay for it.
Are they wrong?
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Elderly people are often reluctant to change what they have grown used to. Not only did my mom continue to use dialup until she went into memory care in 2019, when her Windows XP machine died a couple of years earlier, she wanted me to make Windows 10 on her new machine look and act in every way like XP. (I was not successful at this.)
It couldn’t be too many people. Back in 2015, they only had 2.1 million dial up users and that number must have gone down in a decade
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/08/10/aol-dial-up-i...
But then again, I would love to have a business that has 2.1 million people or even 100 thousand people paying $10 a month…
Doesn't seem to make sense for AOL to shut it down... I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems.
Even with 100k customers, I doubt there are more than 0.1% of them connected at a time - the rest will just be paying the bill for a service they don't use.
There's a few dial up wholesalers out there still. I don't know if the AOL dialer is still proprietary, but I would imagine they could outsource at least most of the pops to keep the revenue flowing, if they really wanted to.
OTOH, maybe shutting down AOL dialup helps Verizon drop its landline business. All the ILECs seem to be in a race to eliminate landlines.
>I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems.
Pretty much. But you might find reliably hardware hard to come by. It would be an ebay operation for sure, sort of like running an internet history museum.
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That seems the most plausible answer, especially in context of get revenue question.
Over the last ten years, the revenue must have dropped off heavily due to deaths, which will only be accelerating. That would make even just 100,000 users at $10 not a sustainable business model at an exponential attrition rate of avg 25% and zero growth. They probably squeezed every dollar out.
Senior citizens who don’t know any better and never upgraded.then in their 50s now in their 70-80s.