Comment by londons_explore
1 day ago
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.
software modems have been a thing for ages. No physical wires - it'll be voip direct to soft modems on a couple of big linux servers.
You can probably do it all on AWS with no physical infra.