Items tagged with dial-up
Remember the terrible sounds your modem used to make when dialing up access to the Internet? In the early days, you had to monitor your minutes online, practice patience as pictures downloaded at a snail's pace, and tolerate trolls who would try to boot you offline with programs called punters. It was a crappy era for the Internet, and for more than 2.1 million people, they're still tolerating some of those headaches. According to AOL's financial results for the first quarter of its fiscal 2015, over 2.1 million people in the U.S. subscribe to its dial-up Internet service. And for the privilege of connecting to the web the way the rest of us used to do it two decades ago, they're paying on average...
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This story is mind-boggling for so many reasons. A $24,000 charge from AT&T? Someone actually pays $51 a month for dial-up access? People actually still use AOL? We must be living in some bizzaro world when things like this are still taking place, but let’s first start from the beginning with 83-year-old Los Angeles resident Ron Dorff. Dorff is a retiree living off a monthly income of roughly $1,500 per month via his Social Security checks. And he inexplicably is paying AT&T $51 for internet access — but this isn’t your garden variety AT&T DSL or U-Verse connection, it’s **gasp** dial-up. Yes, dial-up Internet in this day and age which is priced higher than some broadband plans that...
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Consider yourself lucky if you were raised on broadband and nothing else. For us dinosaurs who were born before the Taylor Swift era, we had to suffer through dial-up service, enduring the barbaric screeches and noises of our modems as they literally dialed up a connection with the Internet. Through a mass marketing campaign in which free trial disks and CDs were handed out everywhere like Halloween candy, America On-Line would emerge as one of the most popular dial-up services of the 1990s, giving us reason to run and buy a swank 56.6K modem, which felt fast at the time. Ah, but with the advent of broadband those days are but a distant memory, at least for most of us. For one reason or another,...
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Remember that awful sound that would emanate from your dial-up modem every time you hopped onto the Internet? Most of us have since graduated to broadband bliss, at least those of us fortunate to live anywhere but the boonies. As it turns out, dial-up is still mildly popular, and whether that's by necessity or choice, AOL is still the go-to company for such service. To wit, AOL has nearly 3.5 million subscribers who use the company's dial-up service, just like you did back in the 1990s. That's according to AOL's third quarter financial report, and represents a 15 percent drop from the same quarter one year prior. Those remaining dial-up subscribers added $17.49 million to AOL's bottom line in...
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A requirement for a new residence has always been, in our opinion, broadband of some type, either DSL or cable modem service. Rural America is still pretty broadband-less, and may stay that way, because of the forever mighty profit margin. As population density drops outside of metropolitan areas, it's impossible for telecommunications companies or cable service providers to justify the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile it can cost to bring fiber to every rural community, let alone every home. The result: Today, just 17 percent of rural U.S. households subscribe to broadband service, according to the Government Accountability Office. This may be the opening broadband...
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