AOL is finally discontinuing its dial-up internet service, after 34 years

For those who lived through the dial-up internet days, you'll no doubt have the sound a modem makes when it does its 'dialling' imprinted on your brain forever. You'll also remember that the slow 28.8K and 56K speeds we lived with meant that you had to download images and that it took several minutes to listen to a single song in compressed MP3 format.

In the United States, America Online or AOL was synonymous with dial-up internet throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. The company gained notoriety by sending out CD-ROMs to anyone with a mailbox, offering free trials to its service alongside an email address that ends with aol.com. With millions of AOL customers going online, the company also helped usher in the age of instant messaging with AOL Instant Messenger and chat rooms - your 1998 version of Discord.

Even though the term 'AOL' conjures up memories of the age of Netscape Navigator and the Excite search engine, you might be surprised to learn that AOL's dial-up internet service is still a thing that exists. But not for long, as the company has announced that after 34 years of various beep and static sounds, it's set to discontinue its 'Dial-up Internet' service on September 30.

The announcement was made with a simple post to the company's support site.

AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. 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.

According to Census data, as many as 163,401 households in the U.S. were still using dial-up internet in 2023, a technology that has long since been superseded by broadband, faster broadband, and even faster broadband. This CNBC report from 2021 notes that AOL's dial-up user count at the time was "in the low thousands," so the demise of dial-up internet is unsurprising.

Anyway, with this news, you've got until September 30 to dust off and pop that AOL CD-ROM into your PC to get that sweet free internet trial.