Time To Say Goodbye To Dial-Up Internet In New York State

People who are coming up in the modern age truly have no clue how much the way we communicate has changed since the early 1990s. Long before we had iPhones with 5G service, long before we had smart glasses and watches that allowed us to be connected to the World Wide Web wherever we went, we had a simple dial-up internet connection that we needed to use a modem and a copper phone line to get online.

Getting on the internet was slow and clunky, using telephone lines and modems that were only capable of 9.6 kb/s, which soon increased to 14.4 kb/s, and your ability to stay on the internet in New York State was dependent on no one else using the telephone while you were trying to navigate your ICQ chat.

Oh, how things have changed in the last 40 years.

AOL Dial-Up Internet Service Going Away For All New Yorkers

While you may not have realized it by the speed of modern technology, dial-up service using AOL is still active, with around 300,000 people nationwide still using dial-up services to connect to the internet.

Now, it seems that after more than 30 years of providing dial-up service, AOL connections using dial-up modems are going away.

According to the BBC, AOL is shutting down its dial-up service by September 30th of this year.

At one point in history, more than 40% of people in North America used AOL to connect to the internet; now those days are long gone. As most people use mobile technology or home-based broadband to connect to the internet, the need for copper telephone line dial-up seems to be something that is no longer needed.

I, like many people, have fond memories of those free internet service discs that used to come in the mail.