America Online—later rebranded to the simpler AOL—was ahead of its time.
Once upon a time, the company connected millions of homes to the internet, wooing customers through their prolific free CDs available at retailers and sent to homes directly through the postal service.
The rite of passage of making sure no one was on the house landline phone, connecting to the AOL system, and hearing that infamous combination of sounds which indicated your personal computer was connecting to the AOL network is one that I went through.
But last month, AOL announced the discontinuation of its dial-up service. Today is the day that service comes to an end.
Even though my technology needs have long outgrown AOL’s dial-up service (thank you, fiber Internet!), there are still parts of the country that rely on dial-up Internet.
The Verge brought this up in its article, AOL is finally shutting down dial-up. According to the piece, the 2019 U.S. Census identified about 265,000 people in America relying on dial-up.
Although a large part of the country has high-speed internet available, some rural communities are still years behind. Unfortunately.
In the past, government programs helped telecommunications companies bring high-speed internet to rural communities across the nation. There is still work to be done for internet equality.
Yes, satellite connections fill in some of the gaps. But those systems have limitations. Hopefully, there will be more motivations to encourage companies to expand high-speed access into those underserved communities.
PHOTO CREDIT: The AOL “running man” logo.
