Some Bad News For Illinoisans Who Still Have AOL Dial-Up Service

If I were trying to write the shortest piece I've ever written, I would have just added "someone picked up the phone in your house."

If that doesn't mean anything to you, it's probably because you're on the younger side, and have no memories of what so many of us had to go through just to get online with our home computers. Not just get online, but stay online, too. Your tedious internet connection could be gone in the blink of an eye if someone else in your house happened to pick up the phone while your were online via a dial-up connection.

And at that time, that was the only way to get online. Here's what a dial-up connection getting started sounded like back in the day:

The Vast Majority Of Internet Users Moved On From Dial-Up Modems Almost 20 Years Ago, But There Are Still Users Out There That Get Online The Real Old-Fashioned Way

I get it if you thought that dial-up internet connections had gone the way of the dinosaurs into complete extinction, but that's not exactly what has happened over the last two decades. There still are, for the time being, people out there who listen to that annoying sound every time they want to check their email or anything else that requires an internet connection.

How many? From what I could find out, there are no concrete numbers as to how many people are using dial-up, but here are some estimates:

• According to the New York Post, around 163,000 households used dial-up as their only internet connection as of 2023.
• Another source has the number of households still using dial-up at around 175,000.
• A separate report suggests “265,331 people with an internet subscription rely on dial-up alone," although this figure may overlap with or differ from household counts.

Illinois has approximately 5 million households (based on U.S. Census estimates of about 12.5 million people and typical household size), so the estimate of how many Illinoisans are still using dial-up connections is about 5,000 to 7,500 households in our state.

In A Little Over A Month, AOL Dial-Up Users Here In Illinois And Around The Country Are Going To Have To Find An Alternative Way To Go Online

Because AOL has decided to pull the plug on dial-up service.

TechSpot.com:

AOL has quietly announced that dial-up internet will no longer be available in its plans as of September 30. The company is also discontinuing the associated software – AOL Dialer and AOL Shield browser – which it says are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections. Those who are with AOL for their dial-up will soon have to move to another service. Luckily, there are still a few others, including NetZero, Juno, and DSL Extreme.