00:00Now, when you go online today, chances are it's a rather seamless affair and you won't hear this sound.
00:11Those of us who are old enough, we remember it very, very well indeed.
00:15It's the original way for many of us to get online, dialing up through a phone line with AOL.
00:21Well, in something of the end of an era, the service is shutting down.
00:25Today, the firm's dial-up service introduced a whole generation in the US to the Internet with over 23 million subscribers at its peak in the late 1990s.
00:36Richard Tang is CEO of the Internet provider Zen. I asked him if he remembers the dial-up sound.
00:43Absolutely. What a noise. And I've got one of those modems right here.
00:47This is the iconic US Robotics courier modem.
00:49We had shelves of these at Zen accepting calls from our customers.
00:56And, of course, as a customer, you needed one of these in your house to connect to the Internet.
01:02And when you were online, of course, your phone line was tied up.
01:05So all of a sudden, people that might be used to making 10, 15-minute calls might be online for an hour, two hours, three hours.
01:13And their friends and relatives were wondering what was going on, why they're engaged all the time.
01:19Those were the days. And how things have changed, and rapidly so.
01:23And we're now on the cusp of even more radical change with AI.
01:28Yes, absolutely. AI is already massive.
01:32It really is just the tip of the iceberg.
01:35And the Internet is a huge enabler for that.
01:38The speeds that we're seeing today, the broadband providers today in the UK are providing speeds of multiple gigabits per second,
01:47which is about 50,000 times faster than those modems were managing back in the mid-90s.
01:54And his business is all about that, which is why he knows all that stuff.
01:59Richard Tang there, chief executive of Zen Internet.
