3 million people still using AOL dial up

It seems like an absolute age ago when dial up was the most common form of internet, times have moved on leaps and bounds since then with fibre optic broadband packages offering 20/50/100 mbps and Google’s latest 1 gigabit internet package for Kansas city just showing how far the internet has really come.

Yet for some, no progress has been made at all. In fact for the 3 million people are still using AOL dial up – it must be like living in the dark ages for those select few. AOL’s second quarter earnings report shows 3 million customers still on the subscriber list for its dial up service, while this is down from AOL’s record figure of 25 million, 3 million is still a staggering amount for such an appalling service by today’s standards.

The figures show that AOL lost just 84,000 from the prior quarter and 400,000 from a year ago. Now everyone knows that the dialup industry is obviously in permanent decline, but AOL’s subscriber losses last quarter were less than half what they were a year ago.

Although we can only speculate why AOL still has so many customers, it seems likely that it is due to the elderly or technophobic not wanting to change because something is better than nothing.

As Fudzilla describe it, AOL’s dial up service is “slower than an asthmatic ant with a heavy load of shopping.”

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