After over three decades of service, AOL is discontinuing its dial-up access!

[thewayne]

My first thought was 'AOL is still around?' Turns out that yes, it was. They had a terrible merger with Time-Warner, then were bought out by Verizon then are now owned by Yahoo? But they still exist. And until the end of September, will still have modem banks that people can access.

Modems? Modems are still made? I can't remember the last time I saw a modem in a store, much less connected to working hardware.

Apparently dial-up internet is still sort of big in rural areas, which makes sense. Not having DSL, much less fiber, dial-up is the best that can be managed. After AOL shuts down its modem banks, dial-up will still be available from Earthlink, Juno, MSN, and NetZero, and probably other smaller, local ISPs.

https://www.tomshardware.com/service-providers/network-providers/aol-will-end-dial-up-internet-service-in-september-34-years-after-its-debut-aol-shield-browser-and-aol-dialer-software-will-be-shuttered-on-the-same-day

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/10/0626249/aol-finally-discontinues-its-dial-up-internet-access---after-34-years

Comments

[silveradept]

The fact that dial-up is still the most reliable, or only, form of Internet access in a lot of places tells me that we need another one of those great Works Progress Administration-style programs, with the goal of rural Internet-ification. Since we know that companies won't do anything that doesn't promise to be profitable to them, it'll take infrastructure investment to basically lay down a fiber-optic network all over the country, in the same way that we have electricity running to basically everywhere in the country. Everybody gets it, everybody pays for it through their taxes, and then everybody's ISP gets to take advantage of the fact that they have a network that can be used to offer excellent pricing and service to everyone.

I know that it won't happen, because there are too many people in government that believe the role of government is to shovel all revenue to private corporations so they can make endless profit without having to actually deliver product, but I can dream that at some point in the world, there will be enough people to authorize both great public works projects and to get the revenue for them from the people who already have excesses.

[thewayne]

One was sort of in progress under the previous administration, but we can't have that here.  The 'If you're not rich, it's your fault and we get to exploit you' mentality.