AOL Want to discontinue the dial up Service

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shadowtheimpure@reddit

Translation: Enough of our unsuspecting customers have finally died that the service is no longer profitable.

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LousyMeatStew@reddit

Bold of you to assume that they stop billing after a customer has passed away.

https://aol.uservoice.com/forums/915850-aol-subscriptions-and-plans/suggestions/40361806-remove-user-name-deceased

There was a video that got posted online a while back (in the 2000s, I think) of a man trying to cancel his father's account after he passed. The customer service rep he was talking to kept offering free hours, alternative billing options, etc. and at some point, the man just started repeating "cancel the account" over and over again.

To be clear, the customer service rep was audibly uncomfortable throughout and it was clear he had a script he was required to follow but IIRC, he was fired in the aftermath rather than corporate leadership accepting responsibility for instituting such an asinine policy to begin with.

Fun fact: back in 2014, the shoe was on the other foot when then-AOL VP Ryan Block tried to cancel his Comcast account.

Of course, that forum post I linked to at the top being from 2020 suggests that not all of the wrinkles have been ironed out quite yet.

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igobyraymond@reddit

I applaud you for going back and making sure your details were correct. Certainly not something that happens often on the internet.

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jfoust2@reddit

There are still people paying for AOL because they don't want to stop using their @AOL.com email address.

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mikee8989@reddit

Can't you sign up for an AOL email like you can with hotmail when you wanted to use MSN messenger?

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DeepDayze@reddit

I believe you can now, and if you had the AOL dialup service most likely you can still keep that AOL email address after service shuts down.

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accidental-poet@reddit

It's been that way for decades. I did home tech support back in the day and specialized in the older generation. I can't tell you how many had broadband and were still paying for AOL dial-up just to keep their account. I helped everyone of the cancel the dial-up and keep their account. No problem.

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NorCalFrances@reddit

It wasn't just them, it was also their older generation friends and family who didn't know how to change the To: address that Mildred had been using for years to let Betty know that they were all getting together for Bill's retirement party.

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accidental-poet@reddit

That doesn't make any sense. My point was that I showed them they could keep using AOL they way they had been using it via broadband, without paying for the dial-up connection, and lose the $30/mo fee for dial-up. Their email address didn't change. AOL email was/is free.

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NorCalFrances@reddit

I misunderstood, my apologies!

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accidental-poet@reddit

Hey, no worries, it's all good! :)

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miku_hatsunase@reddit

Big ups for saving them all tons of money. I'm trying to convince a condo board where family lives to look into this $2000/year weird telecom service the building has had since the 80's. I'm like please just let me take a look, if its doing something I won't touch it but I think you might be spending a chunk of money on something nobody's used since Bush Sr.

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accidental-poet@reddit

I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's some ancient DSL link that nobody is using.

I glad I'm not doing house calls any more. But the number of old folks I saved from wasting money was infuriating. It became my specialty. It was hard to make real money doing that, we only do business support these days.

One lady, she was around 80 and pretty good with her computer. The only things she used it for were docs, email and dumping embroidery designs to her super cool Husqvarna embroidery machine. She called me one day to tell me she had the Greek Squad (sorry Greek folks, nothing against you at all!) look at her computer and it and it needed to be replaced. All it needed was an (at the time) $25 AGP basic video card. Grrrrrrr.

Many people have asked over the years of I hate the Greek Squad. To which I reply, "No way. I love them. After someone goes to them, all they have to do is come to me once, and I've got another client for life! LOVE those guys!"

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NickCharlesYT@reddit

My AOL email from 1997 is still working...haven't paid for AOL in at least 25 years.

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PCRefurbrAbq@reddit

Yes. I signed up for one with my real full name recently, and it was available after thirty years to my surprise.

It's now owned by Verizon, who owns Yahoo and just recently reduced Yahoo's whopping 1TB of email space to 20GB. Looks like belt tightening.

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NorCalFrances@reddit

I will never forgive Yahoo! for wiping out so many people's email accounts in 2020-2021 at the height of COVID. There was so much specialized information in Yahoo Groups that was simply deleted when they were shut down but people figured they still had all the emails. Until COVID hit and supply chains fell apart and people didn't check their 23 year old email account for six months.

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miku_hatsunase@reddit

That was absolutely scummy and brain-dead on yahoo's part. I lost a ton of emails on an old account because they felt the need to wipe them. I cant imagine I'll ever have a reason to go to yahoo.com again.

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EdiblePeasant@reddit

Email is pretty essential to function in the modern world with authentication methods. One thing I learned working IT when the company made changes to email: You do NOT mess with people's email. I guess sometimes setting changes have to be made for security but it's a big event that can generate a lot of support calls.

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jfoust2@reddit

As dependencies increase on email (2FA, accounts for buying services, insurance, health care, investments, etc.) it is much more difficult to consider changing email addresses. It takes hours and hours to remember all the places where you used an email address, and then to jump through the hoops of each web site to change your email. You can't do it after you cancel the old email - because after all, many sites will want to confirm that you still control both the old and new addresses. Heaven forbid your old email provider goes out of business unrelated to any action on your part.

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miku_hatsunase@reddit

I was thinking they should pass a law that you have the right to transfer your email to another provider like with cellular numbers. It would be much more difficult technically though. whatever.com would have to forward all the emails to other providers. What if one went out of business, who would get to take over the domain? What if the domain's email customers are unprofitable and nobody wants it? Maybe just a regulation for the big ones.

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ktrad91@reddit

My grandma being one of them

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Inspector-Dexter@reddit

People can keep their AOL email address without paying any fees to them anymore. I did this for my mom a few years ago, it was pretty easy. You might wanna do it for your granny next time you visit

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ktrad91@reddit

Oh I'm aware and tried explaining it but "I've been a customer since the AOL 1.0 for dos days and this is how I get on the internet" 🤣

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Megaman_90@reddit

I remember having to jump through a bunch of hoops on the phone to get it cancelled back in 2004.

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TheRealFailtester@reddit

A huge reason I been homebrewing my own dial-up. Knowing any remaining providers would be short lived to sign onto these days.

That being said, still quite saddening to hear.

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deelowe@reddit

Look into packet radio which doesn't rely on telecom infrastructure

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DeepDayze@reddit

There are now very very few dialup providers but used to be quite a few in late 90s thru the 00s. In fact the major telcos have all but shut down their copper lines so dialup as a service is fast coming to an end.

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et-pengvin@reddit

My parents live in a rural area and are still on DSL. I'm not surprised it is going away.

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TygerTung@reddit

I'm surprised you be able to use the modern internet in any way with dialup.

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ol-gormsby@reddit

Modern? Probably not. But you can still use many protocols, they'll just be slow.

The text protocols will be OK. USENET is still a thing. And email is still a fairly low-overhead protocol, if you're not sending nudes to people.

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ZoidbergGE@reddit

Basic text email, but so much of email these days are the marketing spam that’s chocked full of graphics.

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DeepDayze@reddit

Those graphical emails would take as long as a webpage to load no doubt. Very few emails these days are pure text.

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ol-gormsby@reddit

MS Outlook and probably other clients have a default setting to *not* download certain elements, including graphic files.

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keonyn@reddit

They could probably make a new mountain out of all the CD's and disks that service sent out over the years.

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Phydoux@reddit

Who uses dialup anymore? I thought it was dead... And I figured most homes no longer have phone service We got rid of ours when we finally had a good cell service near us. No need for a landline phone anymore... It's the 2020's. Not the 1920's...

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NorthCountryBob@reddit

TIL that AOL still offers dial-up service.

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Joonicks@reddit

can any modern homepage be downloaded in less than an hour at dialup speeds?

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jdx6511@reddit

The median weight of a desktop page is 2866 kB.

A realistic maximum "56k" modem download speed is 48 kbps, or 6kB/s, so 21600 kB/h.

One could surf the modern web at a leisurely 6 or 7 pages per hour at dialup speed.

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onlyappearcrazy@reddit

Aren't you forgetting the start and stop bits in serial data in your calculations from bits to bytes?

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mallardtheduck@reddit

The flow control doesn't make it past the modem (which is typically communicating with the PC significantly faster than the dial-up link), but you would need to include the TCP/IP and PPP overhead...

For dial-up PPP connections the most commonly used MTU (~max total packet size) is 576 bytes. TCP/IP takes 40 bytes from that to make the MRU (~max payload) 536 bytes. PPP adds 8 bytes of overhead on top of that, so you get 536 bytes of payload for every 584 raw bytes received or ~92% efficiency. That makes the 6KB/s quoted above more like 5.5KB/s.

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onlyappearcrazy@reddit

I was looking at wire speeds.

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jdx6511@reddit

Good point about the protocol overhead. The median page would still load in less than an hour. Just adds a little more time for quiet contemplation, or eager anticipation, while waiting for the page to load.

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MorallyDeplorable@reddit

serial can do much faster than a modem can, the serial data control bits are basically meaningless to the dial-up speed.

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mallardtheduck@reddit

If you disable images, fonts, etc. It gets much more reasonable, down to a few 10s of KB. Even less if you're not running JS.

Text-only browsing is completely doable at dial-up speeds. I've done so with multiple retrocomputers (although typically I can get the full 115200bps that a standard PC serial port is capable of, but that's only 2x the maximum possible dial-up speed).

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greyhoundbuddy@reddit

I think Debian and some other Linux distributions still include the text-only Lynx browser.

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mallardtheduck@reddit

Lynx, Links and Elinks are all still being maintained/updated AFAIK.

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shh_coffee@reddit

Many telcos are switching or have switched to voip which isn't good for dial up as well. I'm not using AOL but here on my voip line, the best I can dial in with is my 300baud modem and there's still junk chars. I can't even get my 14.4kbs one to connect.

Besides the low user count, I'm guessing the lack of quality POTS lines out there didn't help.

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