AOL along with Yahoo was bought by Verizon and rolled into its Oath brand then 
sold off to I think private equity.  Mostly a web portal site probably makes 
its money by data mining.  Dialup service was probably incidental to their 
business for 10+ years.  We still get customers though with aol.com email 
addresses.  Even back when dialup was still a thing I saw more people using 
Netzero/Juno.  I just checked www.juno.com and they are still selling dialup 
service.

Remember dialup "accelerators" like Propel?

-----Original Message-----
From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Trey Scarborough
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2025 11:17 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT: Oh No! No more modem sounds!

I don't see how they have lasted this long or how there could be a 250k people 
that would be able to get an actual land line to be able to use 56k dialup.

This makes me have so many questions. Like where are all these PRIs and dailup 
units to run these. I remember removing many of the old Lucent max TNTs that 
AOL used for dialup in our COs in the mid 2000s. I tried to reconfigure a 
couple of them to use as VOIP gateways, but they had a custom firmware on them 
that it wouldn't go back to regular defaults. 
How are they still running all of these local numbers? I'm in ATT/VZ/CL main 
COs on a regular basis and think I would notice dial up equipment running in 
the colo spaces and cant say that I have noticed any. I have seen a few 
portmaster PM3s that do not look like they are functioning anymore. All the 
ports have alarms and the companies they are labeled as being have been 
bankrupt for years.

For certain the oddity that they are still somewhat functioning today 
completely astonishes me.

On 8/11/2025 2:36 PM, Bill Prince wrote:
> For those of you who think nostalgically about those warm modem 
> dial-up tones, AOL is discontinuing its dial-up service. Music to the 
> ears of all ISPs that there will now be about a quarter million new 
> internet customers.
>
> https://pcper.com/2025/08/aol-discontinues-dial-up-wait-what/
>

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