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Comment by trimbo | Hacker News Reader

Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!

I very briefly worked at an ISP long after the days of dial-up were over. We had some super old servers on the network. These things hadn't been patched in forever, the OS was unsupported, etc. I think they were old Sun machines and Sun wasn't in business anymore. I asked what they were for and I was told there were still people paying for dial-up and their accounts were on there. They weren't actually using it, but the credit card auto payments were still going through and that was higher than the cost of the electricity. Nobody wanted to mess with it as long as people were still paying.

I worked on a help desk from 2013-2016 for an MSP that served some rural telcos. A couple of the clients still offered dial-up internet, so there were a few hundred people with dial up at that point. They were largely people with very rural homes that they didn't even have DSL. They were largely older people. And they just made a steady profit, the equipment and lines basically just worked and they had a FAR lower rate of calls than the DSL, Cable, Fiber, etc customers.

Reminds me of how AT&T continued generating revenue from renting landline phones many years after it became legal to own and connect your own equipment to their network.

Apparently this is still happening (although I imagine their customer base is rapidly dwindling): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLT_Consumer_Lease_Services

I worked from 2011-2013 at a small regional ILEC that had some dialup customers.

Yeah it largely just worked.

I’m curious what those customers do today. Are they still using those computers with antique web browsers?

Maybe email and Amazon are enough, though.

I've got in-laws that use 12yo Macs; would not surprise me in the least if a lot of older folks were still using whatever box from Best Buy or a relative they got in the late 00s.

Judging from how Amazon loads now on modern speeds, I'm guessing Amazon is out of the question.

Email should be fine... as long as you don't use a web client.

My mom, who used dialup as recently as 2019 (not AOL) used it almost exclusively for email...Gmail's simple interface. She had a very active group of email correspondents, but Gmail on Chrome was her only need.

I have now seen multiple articles about this and none of them talked about how much use it was actually getting today, which I have found disappointing.

Not sure why none that I have seen have been any better.

It sounds like AOL won’t disclose that information and the only national survey anyone has cited doesn’t distinguish by ISP.

Disclosure would likely sooner or later compare actual users to people paying for the service, and while a discrepancy of orders of magnitude more of the latter probably wasn't illegal (unless some enterprising AG decides to make it a crime) it would be very bad press. No point in risking that when they can just stay mum.

I also want to hear from the people who still maintain AOL in 2025!

Almost certainly older people living in remote areas who login to the AOL to check the email box for pictures of the grandkids.

At this point, it would not surprise me if there was a very small but very enthusiastic community of retro computing enthusiasts with AOL accounts.

Having very older parents, what an important use case!

Long gone are the days of writing a family update, including physical photos, and putting them in the post.

Fortunately, I’m able to guide my parents in their tech usage. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be their age and have nobody to do the same. The sheer isolation… It’s horrible to contemplate.

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