Bye Bye to AOL Dialup

The iconic screech of AOL's dial-up modem—that distinctive digital handshake that welcomed millions to the internet—will finally fall silent on September 30, 2025. I find this moment oddly poignant, not for nostalgic reasons, but because it perfectly illustrates how dramatically our connectivity landscape has evolved.

Taking a step back, I think there are a few distinct camps forming around this news:

1. Those feeling nostalgic about the "good old days" of the early internet
2. Those celebrating how far we've come technologically
3. Those who see this as merely another milestone in an endless progression
4. Those who don't understand why anyone still used dial-up in 2025

What's fascinating to me isn't the death of dial-up itself—that's been inevitable for decades—but what the evolution from 56K modems to multi-gigabit connections reveals about our technological trajectory.

The connectivity story has unfolded in predictable yet remarkable phases: copper wires giving way to coaxial cable, then fiber optic lines rewriting the rules entirely. Meanwhile, wireless caught up, satellite became legitimately viable (who saw Starlink coming?), and our baseline expectations shifted from "Can I connect?" to "Why isn't this instantaneous?"

I don't believe we've reached any kind of plateau, despite what some network providers might suggest. Cooper's Law—which states that wireless capacity doubles roughly every 30 months—has held true for half a century, and there's little reason to think we've suddenly hit some magical ceiling.

What's particularly interesting is how each leap in network performance hasn't just accelerated existing applications but enabled entirely new categories of products. Streaming video, cloud computing, real-time collaboration across continents—none of these were feasible in the dial-up era. They required not just incremental improvements but order-of-magnitude jumps in connectivity.

The next frontier is clearly AI and augmented reality, where latency becomes even more critical than raw bandwidth. When you're interacting with an AI assistant or navigating an AR overlay, even small delays create cognitive dissonance that breaks the experience. This isn't just about comfort—it's about fundamental usability.

Companies pouring billions into hyperscale data centers aren't doing it for bragging rights; they're betting that near-instantaneous AI inference will unlock entirely new markets. And they're right. Three seconds might seem fast in absolute terms, but it's an eternity when you're waiting for an AI to respond to a voice command.

What I find most shortsighted is the "gigabit is enough" mentality that permeates much of today's network planning. The companies that will dominate the next decade aren't just scaling up existing infrastructure—they're fundamentally rethinking network topologies to push computing to the edge and designing for symmetrical usage patterns as users generate as much data as they consume.

When AOL's final modem goes silent, it won't be a funeral for an outdated technology so much as a reminder that what seems blazingly fast today will look comically inadequate tomorrow. The race doesn't pause for nostalgia, and neither should our planning horizons.

The death of dial-up isn't the end of an era—it's just another lap marker in a race that never ends.¹

¹ It's worth noting that while we celebrate these advances, they've also widened the digital divide in many ways. The gap between those with fiber connections and those still struggling with basic broadband has significant economic and social implications that aren't addressed by simply celebrating faster speeds.