When I read on LinkedIn the other day that AOL has finally switched off its dial-up internet service, it felt like the closing of a chapter in history. For many people, the sound of a modem handshake and the cheery announcement of “You’ve Got Mail” were the soundtrack to their first encounters with the online world. To those of us who worked behind the scenes, building the infrastructure that carried those calls and packets, it was more than nostalgia, it was the moment when the internet became real, tangible, and global.
As a young(er) engineer at UUNET, and later with MCI WorldCom, I was part of the team responsible for building AOL’s international network outside the United States. It was work that felt experimental at the time, though in hindsight, it laid the foundation for how billions of people now take connectivity for granted. I still remember the pride we all felt when the Mission Impossible film hit the cinema, complete with the heroes using the very systems we had been working on. Suddenly, the infrastructure we were sweating over late at night wasn’t just a collection of circuits and POPs, it was part of the cultural imagination.
The scale of what we were doing was immense. Every new country meant new negotiations, new technical hurdles, and new partnerships. It was about more than routers and cables, it was about finding ways to stitch together a patchwork of regulatory environments, telecom monopolies, and emerging user demand, and behind the glossy marketing campaigns and the endless supply of AOL installation CDs (I used them as coasters for my coffee mugs), the real work was far grittier. Building out local points of presence, the access nodes that allowed users to dial in without racking up international call charges, was a huge effort. It required careful planning, technical coordination, and no small amount of diplomacy. Each POP was a victory in itself, bringing lower latency and a better experience to people who were still, in many cases, hearing the internet over a phone line for the very first time.
I sometimes think the beauty of dial-up was in its limitations. Speeds were painfully slow, connections unreliable, but the experience was uniform enough that it felt accessible. Unlike the fragmented landscape of today’s technology ecosystems, everyone who logged on via AOL knew roughly what to expect. There was a shared expectation in that login process, a kind of global ritual. And the simplicity of it masked the complexity underneath, the mesh of global infrastructure, multinational teams, and countless negotiations required just to keep it running.
What those years taught me, more than anything, was that accessibility will always trump technical purity. Dial-up was clunky and slow, but its availability and affordability made it transformative. It was never about dazzling users with performance; it was about giving them a gateway, a stepping stone, if you like. Once people were connected, the market evolved around them. That lesson has repeated itself in every wave of technology since.
Partnerships mattered too. AOL’s rise was not built on technology alone; much of it depended on distribution deals, telecom arrangements, and the ability to navigate different national regulators. I often found myself in meetings where the technical details were less important than the trust built with a counterpart across the table. That mix of diplomacy and engineering was essential.
The other striking lesson is that every technology cycle creates winners and losers. CompuServe had once seemed untouchable, only to be overtaken by AOL’s aggressive push into the mainstream. Later, AOL itself would be overtaken as broadband became the standard and new competitors entered the market. At the time, the pace of these transitions felt dizzying, but looking back, they were simply the natural pace of a new industry. The real constant is not the technology itself but the inevitability of change and disruption.
When I think about where we are today, I see echoes of that same cycle repeating itself. The arrival of 5G (and 6G on the horizon) has been heralded as the next great leap in connectivity, but for most people, it won’t just be about speed. Just as with dial-up, its success will depend on scale, reach, and accessibility. The ability to connect rural communities to power the everyday applications that people barely think about will matter more than some theoretical download speeds on a chart.
Satellite internet, led by projects such as Starlink and OneWeb, feels a little like those early POP rollouts. Each new launch extends the network’s footprint, bringing service to places previously thought unreachable. It reminds me of the pride (relief) we felt when a new dial-up node went live in a city far from a major hub. There’s the same sense of effort, of trying to make the invisible visible, one access point at a time.
And then there is the quiet revolution of AI-driven networks. These aren’t as visible to end users as a satellite constellation or a 5G mast, but they matter just as much. The intelligence being built into routing, optimisation, and security is doing what we once had to do manually, directing a global system and making it appear seamless to the person logging in. It’s the modern equivalent of masking the messy realities of dial-up behind the reassuring simplicity of a “connect” button.
The end of AOL’s dial-up service might seem like a minor footnote in the grand sweep of internet history, but for those of us who lived through it, it represents the moment when the world first learned what it meant to be online. The modem’s high-pitched beeps and chirps, the slow-loading pages, even the frustrations of busy signals, all of it was part of a shared initiation to be able to be online.
For me, it was also a reminder of the scale of effort required to make something so fragile appear reliable. The long nights, the negotiations, the colleagues scattered across continents. What users experienced as a simple phone call was, in truth, a vast web of coordination and technology that will continue to change, sometimes in ways we can predict, but often in ways we cannot see coming. But accessibility, trust, and scale will remain the true measures of success. Dial-up may be gone, but its legacy endures, not in its speed or its reliability, but in the lesson that even the most modest gateway can open up a new world.
Review