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Comment by hopelite | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In very rural places, they may only have edge or 3g at best, if they have any connection.

Where I live in Colorado there is literally no cell coverage by any cellular provider. No 5/4/or 3G coverage in miles in any direction while outside and no matter how far up the mountain behind my house I climb.

Their maps claim there is coverage, but there is not, and they don't really care that its not true.

Many rural areas have no cellular service. I vacation in an area where Satellite, landline phone service, and some very bad DSL service are the only options. Since it's a vacation spot, we opt not to use the internet there, but there are people who live there.

Rural mountainous areas have very bad cell coverage. When I grew up the local Verizon store didn't actually get signal and you had to drive up the road from there to take calls.

Those are the kinda places I imagine are expensive to run new installs to, so it's really phone lines or satellite

Here is "ping 8.8.8.8" showing latency over cellular internet some of the time, and I live in the centre of a city:

  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6145 ttl=114 time=363613.635 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6175 ttl=114 time=334289.726 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6176 ttl=114 time=333689.274 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6177 ttl=114 time=332851.621 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6178 ttl=114 time=332673.845 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6179 ttl=114 time=332618.215 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6180 ttl=114 time=331634.496 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6181 ttl=114 time=330736.758 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6182 ttl=114 time=331050.087 ms
  64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=6183 ttl=114 time=330813.820 ms

5+ minutes for 8.8.8.8 to respond to a ping! Or am I reading this incorrectly?

You're reading it correctly. I was astonished too.

You can spend more for the higher tier plan that won't get your traffic prioritized down into the "best effort" tier. It looks like your neighbors have already done that. You may need to buy directly from whomever is running your towers and not a MVNO to get that.

Honestly, I'm actually shocked and impressed that whatever is queuing your data up has enough buffer space to hold on the packets for so long without dropping them.

It's the Three network in the UK, not an MVNO, and I'm paying for the "unlimited data" plan. They don't offer a higher tier as far as I know.

I've been using it every day for work for at least 10 years, and it served me very well, including all my remote work through the pandemic, gaming and Netflix, sometimes downloading terabytes per month without issues.

But they've managed capacity disastrously in my area recently. For the last three months. Where I live, and other parts of the centre of town, every day for about 4 hours from 11am to 3pm, it goes offline most of the time, so the network is unusable. It's impossible to work - can't even do chat or an audio meeting.

When I ran ping, I found it wasn't really offline sometimes. Sometimes it was just such high latency and/or packet loss that it may as well be. Signal strength was good, and voice calls worked fine.

I tried three different 4G/5G routers, four different accounts, and two phones. All showed the same behaviours at the same times of day. At first folks in the Three store said I need newer 5G capable equipment, then it was a new SIM, but I tried all their options. In the end I returned everything to them, cancelled contracts, and they said it was most likely congestion, which fits the observations.

I'm amazed they haven't fixed it, as it must have been affecting thousands of customers for months, in a way that's surely obvious to any monitoring equipment.

With regard to the earlier poster's point about latency, when it worked perfectly my latency (both at home and in the office) was always at least 35ms or so, spiking randomly on a timescale of seconds up to about 400ms. Good for many things, but not the kinds of low-latency gaming, interactive streaming or other services some people take for granted. SSH felt annoyingly slow, but usable.

wtf what provider is this? I used cellular internet for a year with remote desktop for work, so this is shocking to me.

It's the Three network in the UK. I've been using it every day for work for at least 10 years, and it served me very well, including all my remote work through the pandemic, gaming and Netflix, sometimes downloading terabytes per month without issues.

When I ran ping, I found it wasn't really offline sometimes. Sometimes it was just such high latency and/or packet loss that it may as well be. Signal strength was good, and voice calls worked fine.

No idea why you're being downvoted. I can right now today call AT&T and get 300Mb cellular internet for my house. It's $65/mo.

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.

But 56k dialup (actual speed more like 25k) is too slow to load an https certificate before most sites time out. You aren't going to be able to load google.com

You'll notice I didn't mention dialup at all in my comment.

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.

AT&T used to be the default landline provider for my address, but they recently got the regulators to release them from that responsibility, so now there isn't one. So I can't buy a landline for my property, even though there's copper running right past it and a pedestal where all they'd have to do is reconnect the line to my house. If I call AT&T, they'll sell me a cell phone, but not a landline.

Fortunately I have fiber (from another company), so it's not a problem; but the concept of being able to get a landline anywhere is going away.

Yeah, I think the POTS line is gone for good since I canceled it. The company doesn't even show it as an offering on their website any longer, only selling VoIP with DSL at this point. The cranked up price was probably a nudge to get rid of any holdouts.

No, it is not feasible to run modem signals over VOIP, as the various codecs all compress signals and cut frequencies and all manner of things to reduce bandwidth consumption, which are incompatible with modem signaling. You could get away with it in a homelab for fun, but you have absolutely no control over what VOIP codecs e.g. Comcast is running, so it is effectively impossible. Even if the phone company says they can offer you a copper line, your copper line will eventually get converted to VOIP at the end of the street or wherever, and then it's up to whatever commercial provider you're paying to choose the codecs for VOIP, which are never modem-friendly. I worked on this stuff about ten years ago. There are fax codecs but they are very hard to get working reliably.

I've done modem calls over VOIP. Any connection above 2400 is incredibly unstable for the reasons you describe.

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?

Yes

As far as I can tell, yes. AOL pretends that the subscription offers other services (tech support, "security" etc) but you definitely appear to be able to keep access to your email address without paying the $50/month subscription.

I switched phones and somehow lost my Netscape (owned by AOL) email password. Would'nt have been a big deal but I had it linked to some famous .com service that I have been using since the 90's. I paid something like $10 to have a live human reset the password and get back in.

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.)

Senior citizens who don’t know any better and never upgraded.then in their 50s now in their 70-80s.

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