Far-Flung Modems

The basics: Why AOL is ditching dial-up now, rather than 15 years ago

I should preface this by saying that I have covered the basic topic of dial-up internet so many times that I could probably create a book about the history of the modem just from old issues of Tedium.

Long story short, it’s no surprise that dial-up has been on the downswing for close to a quarter-century. Despite not having needed a dial-up modem myself since the summer of 2001, I was so passionate about dial-up that I begged to get one for my 13th birthday. Modems are hard to shake, and not just because we remember waiting so long for them to do their thing.

As I’ve learned through all this past coverage, the telephone modem was ultimately a hack, pushed through partly by Deaf users who worked around the phone industry’s monopolistic regulations, inventing technologies like the acoustic coupler along the way.

To make that hack function, modems had to do multiple conversions in real time—from data to audio and back again, in two directions. As I put it in a piece that compared the modem to the telegraph:

As noted above, the modem, at least in its telephone-based forms, represents a dance between sound and data. By translating information into an aural signal, then into current, then back into an aural signal, then back into data once again, the modulation and demodulation going on is very similar to the process used with the original telegraph, albeit done manually, where information was input by a person and translated into electric pulses, where another person would receive the result.

Modems work the same way, except no additional people are needed on the other end.

(You can scold me for that 61-word sentence on your own time.)

The result of all this back and forth was that modems had to give up a hell of a lot of speed to make this all work. The need to connect over a medium built for an entirely different medium meant that data was at risk of getting lost over the line. (This is why error correction was an essential part of the modem’s evolution.)

Telephone lines were a hugely inefficient system for data because they were built for voice. Voice is easy to compress—and is done so heavily, especially on cell phones—but compressing audio means giving up data. That’s not such a good thing when your goal is to share data on the line.

Plus, there was the problem of line access. With a call, you could generally only take up one line at a time, and you could not easily share a connection. That meant you couldn’t make phone calls while using dial-up, leading to some homes getting a second line. And at the ISP level, while having multiple lines, this setup got very complex, very fast. I

The phone industry knew this, but their initial solution, ISDN, did not take off among mainstream consumers. (A later one, DSL, had better uptake, and is likely one of the few options rural users currently have.)

So the industry moved to other solutions to get consumers internet—coaxial cable, which was already widespread because of cable TV, and fiber, which wasn’t. The problem is, coax never reached quite as far as telephone wires did, in part because cable television wasn’t technically a utility in the way electricity or water were. (Fortunately, there were satellites.)

In recent years, many attempts have been made to classify internet access as a public utility, though the most recent one was struck down by an appeals court earlier this year.

The public utility regulation is important. The telephone had struggled to reach rural communities in the 1930s, and only did so after a series of regulations, including the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, were put into effect. So too did electricity, with a whole freaking law, the Rural Electrification Act, being necessary to expand its reach.

But the reach of broadband is frustratingly incomplete, as highlighted by the fact that many areas of the country are not properly covered by cellular signals. And getting new wires hung can be an immensely difficult task, in part because companies that sell fiber, like Verizon and Google, often stop investing because of the high costs. (Though, to Google’s credit, they started expanding again.)

The result of all this is that, in some areas of the U.S., dial-up remains the best option, the result of decades of poor investment in internet infrastructure. This, for years, has propped up companies like AOL, which has evolved numerous times since it foolishly merged with Time Warner a quarter-century ago.

But AOL is not the company it was. After multiple acquisitions and spin-outs, it is now a mere subsidiary of Yahoo, and it long ago transitioned into a Web-first property. Oh, it still has those subscriptions, but they’re effectively fancy analogues for security software that your grandparents don’t need. And their email client, while having been defeated by the likes of Gmail years ago, still has its fans. (Side note: At what point do Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail merge? It’s gotta be something they’re talking about, right?)

When I posted the AOL news, I would say 90% of the responses were jokes or genuine notes of respect. But there was a small contingent, maybe 5%, that talked about how much this was going to screw over far-flung communities. I don’t think it’s AOL’s responsibility to keep this model going forever. But I do think that the fact that AOL represented the weak leg propping up online access in far-flung areas suggests that we have not done our job when it comes to rural internet.

It’s not AOL’s fault. But AOL is the face of this failing.

You don’t need a white noise machine, you have this video.

Think of AOL dropping dial-up as part of a long fade-out

As technologies go, the dial-up modem has not lasted quite as long as the telegram, which has been active in one form or another for 181 years. But the modem, which was first used in 1958 as part of an air-defense system, has stuck around for a good 67 years. That makes it one of the oldest pieces of computer related technology still in modern use.

To give you an idea of how old that is: 1958 is also the year that the integrated circuit, an essential building block of any modern computer, was invented. The disk platter, which became the modern hard drive, was invented a year earlier. The floppy disk came a decade later.

(And it should be noted that the modem itself is not dying—your smartphone has one—but the connection your landline has to your modem, the really loud one, has seen better days.)

This news that AOL is dropping its service might be seen as the end of the line for dial-up, but the story of the telegram hints that this may not be the case. In 2006, much hay was made about Western Union sending its final telegram. But Western Union was never the only company sending telegrams, and another company picked up the business. You can still send a telegram via International Telegram in 2025. (It’s not cheap: A single message, sent the same day, is $34, plus 75 cents per word.)

In many ways, AOL dropping the service is a sign that, like FTP, this already niche use case is going to get more niche.

But niche use cases have a way of staying relevant, given the right audience. It’s sort of like why doctors continue to use pagers. As a Planet Money episode from two years ago noted, the additional friction of using pagers worked well with the way doctors functioned, because it ensured that they knew the messages they were getting didn’t compete with anything else.

If you go to an auto-body repair shop and see your invoice getting printed out on a tractor-feed dot-matrix printer, you know that you’re getting an invoice, and not someone’s MapQuest directions. Sometimes, things just stay put because it makes sense for them to stay put. The nice thing about having a very old computer doing a task that any other computer can do better is that you know exactly what it is being used for.

So there is life in dial-up. But AOL? It is essentially a giant advertising business that sells subscriptions, and those subscriptions are about to lose their most important legacy feature.

But while dial-up may have been AOL’s primary business earlier in its life, it hasn’t really been its focus in quite a long time. AOL is a highly diversified company, whose primary focus over the past 15 years has been advertising.

Dial-up is likely never going to totally die, unless the landline phone system itself gets knocked offline, which AT&T has admittedly been itching to do. It remains one of the cheapest options to get online outside of drinking a single coffee at a Panera and bringing your laptop.

AOL is simply too weak to support this next generation themselves. Their inroad to broadband was supposed to be Time Warner Cable; that didn’t work out, so they pivoted to something else, but kept around the legacy business while it was still profitable. It’s likely that emerging technologies, like Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, which relies on distributing broadband over unused “white spaces” on the television dial, stand a better shot. It’s likely that 5G connectivity will improve over time, and perhaps someone not named Elon Musk will offer an alternative to Starlink eventually.

Technologies don’t die. They just slowly become so irrelevant that they might as well be dead.