It couldn’t be too many people. Back in 2015, they only had 2.1 million dial up users and that number must have gone down in a decade

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/08/10/aol-dial-up-i...

But then again, I would love to have a business that has 2.1 million people or even 100 thousand people paying $10 a month…

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londons_explore 9 days ago | parent | next [-]

Doesn't seem to make sense for AOL to shut it down... I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems.

Even with 100k customers, I doubt there are more than 0.1% of them connected at a time - the rest will just be paying the bill for a service they don't use.

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toast0 9 days ago | parent | next [-]

There's a few dial up wholesalers out there still. I don't know if the AOL dialer is still proprietary, but I would imagine they could outsource at least most of the pops to keep the revenue flowing, if they really wanted to.

OTOH, maybe shutting down AOL dialup helps Verizon drop its landline business. All the ILECs seem to be in a race to eliminate landlines.

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protocolture 9 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>I'm sure you could set up a dial up ISP in 2025 with just 1 guy who understands telephony and software modems.

Pretty much. But you might find reliably hardware hard to come by. It would be an ebay operation for sure, sort of like running an internet history museum.

	▲	londons_explore 9 days ago \| parent [-]
		software modems have been a thing for ages. No physical wires - it'll be voip direct to soft modems on a couple of big linux servers. You can probably do it all on AWS with no physical infra.

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hopelite 8 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That seems the most plausible answer, especially in context of get revenue question.

Over the last ten years, the revenue must have dropped off heavily due to deaths, which will only be accelerating. That would make even just 100,000 users at $10 not a sustainable business model at an exponential attrition rate of avg 25% and zero growth. They probably squeezed every dollar out.