In return the telecoms get a golden opportunity to aggressively market not only their dial-up services but their whole host of telecommunications services.
Our relationship goes back more than a decade, when Chip was selling cloud based computing services to companies that were just getting dial-up internet connections.
That's a critical point for EarthLink, which is seeing the numbers of subscribers to its dial-up Internet service decline faster than it can add subscriptions to new broadband services.
Nonetheless, more and more Internet service providers are likely to start offering voice services as a way to try to hang on to dial-up customers and keep them from going to the cable or phone companies.