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05/15/2015

2 million Americans still use AOL’s dial-up internet

From Slate

On Tuesday, Verizon announced that it plans to buy AOL for $4.4 billion. Verizon’s interest in AOL is being framed as mostly about two things—digital video content and advertising technology. But with the merger, Verizon will also acquire the dregs of AOL’s dial-up Internet service, and the roughly 2.16 million American consumers who here, now, in the year 2015, still pay to use it.

For a bit of context, as of July 2014, there were an estimated 280 million Internet users in the United States. AOL’s dial-up subscribers would make up a mere 0.8 percent of them. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine more than 2 million people still sitting around, listening to the chirping dial-up tones, waiting for their connections to load. Why might anyone still subscribe to this service? For starters, lack of choice. The Federal Communications Commission has found that roughly 17 percent of the U.S. population, or some 55 million people, lack access to broadband Internet. In rural America, that lack of access affects more than half of the population.

Another argument is that many lingering dial-up users are older people who never upgraded their connections and are generally nervous about technology. For this slice of the population, AOL’s dial-up plans are likely quite appealing because they offer pretty comprehensive support and security. As Walt Hickey once put it in FiveThirtyEight, “AOL is basically selling subscriptions to people who need tech support for when their son-in-law isn’t home for Thanksgiving to fix the router.

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