Archive for AOL

AOL To Kill Dial Up Service In September…. Wait… Dial Up Is Still A Thing?

Posted in Commentary with tags on August 11, 2025 by itnerd

From the “This is still a thing?” department comes the news that AOL is finally killing their dial up service in September:

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.

This change will not affect any other benefits in your AOL plan, which you can access any time on your AOL plan dashboard. To manage or cancel your account, visit MyAccount.

Now, for those of you who are wondering why dial up is still a thing in the era of broadband, the reason is simple. There’s parts of the country that simply don’t have broadband access. Be it over cable, fibre, DSL, or even 5G due to cost or lack of infrastructure or both. Thus dial up is pretty much the only option. If you combine that with the fact that for however many people still connect to the Internet using dial up, this is pretty much the end of an era.

RIP dial up Internet.

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RIP AOL Instant Messenger

Posted in Commentary with tags on October 6, 2017 by itnerd

It’s 20 years old and it is now about to be deep sixed. I’m talking about AOL Instant Messenger which according to this blog post is to be no more on December 15, 2017 thanks to Verizon who got AOL when they bought Yahoo. They didn’t say what if anything will replace it.

Now those of a certain age, such as myself, will remember AOL Instant Messenger as the dominant instant messaging platform out there when Netscape was the browser of choice.

You might want to pour AOL Instant Messenger a pint and give it a toast today.

 

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BREAKING: Verizon To Buy AOL

Posted in Commentary with tags , on May 12, 2015 by itnerd

Remember AOL or America On Line? It used to be the top ISP on earth and I remember taking the floppy disks that they sent me and recycling them. That saved me $10 if I got ten of them. These days it owns The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, MAKERS and AOL.com. Though it still has a significant dial up Internet business. That makes the purchase of AOL by Verizon which has just been announced interesting. Verizon will shell out $4.4 billion for AOL and I am guessing that it will use it for digital content so that they can set themselves apart from their competition.

This should be fun to watch.

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Time Warner To Spin Off AOL To Stop The Bleeding Of Cash

Posted in Commentary with tags , on May 28, 2009 by itnerd

It was announced this morning that media giant Time Warner will buy the 5% of AOL that it doesn’t already own so that it can spin it off as a separate company:

After the proposed separation is complete, AOL will compete as a standalone company – focused on growing its Web brands and services, which currently reach more than 107 million domestic unique visitors a month, as well as its advertising business, which operates the leading online display network that reaches more than 91% of the domestic online audience. AOL will also continue to operate one of the largest Internet access subscription services in the U.S.

This basically ends a marriage made in hell from the perspective of both companies. At the height of the dot.com boom, they merged in January of 2000 and was the world’s largest ISP at the time with plans on ruling the world. Since the merger, the value of AOL has dropped significantly from its $240 billion high. Its subscriber base has not grown since 2002 as high speed Internet became popular, and they have since become a content provider similar to companies such as Yahoo as opposed to an ISP. Now it’s a major cash drag on Time Warner, which is why they want to spin it off.

Seeing as their revenues dropped by 23% last quarter, I expect the bleeding to continue for AOL. But at least Time Warner won’t be affected.

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