The end of the “Greeting Web”: AOL definitively extinguishes its modems, 30 years of the Internet fade away

September 30, 2025 will remain a symbolic date for several generations of Internet users. AOL, which had democratized access to the web in the 1990s, definitively abandoned its connection service by MoDem. The announcement, discreetly published on the company’s blog, has not specified the exact number of users still concerned. A silence that perhaps testifies to the magnitude of the decline.

This small characteristic noise of the modem that connected, mixture of whistling and electronic clicking, was part of the daily life of millions of people: it signaled the opening of a window on the world, even if it sometimes took several minutes to open. Today, this expectation seems inconceivable when we consult our smartphones without even thinking about it.

AOL definitively abandons Internet access by telephone line

This disappearance sounds like a predictable epilogue. Today’s web pages, saturated with high definition videos and images, would have taken hours to appear with these old equipment. The ADSL then the fiber optics gradually made these connections obsolete which painfully reached 56 kilobits per second. Patience was not a virtue but a necessity when you wanted to consult your mailbox.

The story of AOL illustrates the brutal reversals of the technological sector. In 2001, Time Warner spent $ 165 billion to buy this business then considered the future of the Internet. Fourteen years later, Verizon only paid 4.4 billion to acquire what remained of the fallen giant; In 2021, AOL Messenger also disappearedfor the benefit of more modern services. A dizzying fall reminiscent that nothing is ever acquired in the digital universe.

France follows a similar movement. Orange has already disconnected 162 ADSL municipalities last Januaryaffecting approximately 20,000 homes. The copper network, which conveyed these telephone connections, must disappear completely before 2030. The fiber optics will definitively take over, offering flows several thousand times higher.