Erols Internet

» see erols.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

There is a Turkish first name on the biggest dial-up ISP the Washington DC area ever had, and I found that out the way you find out most things doing this: by looking up something else. Erol Onaran emigrated to Virginia and opened an electronics sales and repair business in 1963. In 1980 he started renting videocassettes out of it.

That second decision turned into 208 stores across five states and the District of Columbia, and by 1985 Erol's was the largest privately owned videocassette rental company in the country. Blockbuster paid forty million dollars for it in 1990. Most people would have stopped there. In 1995 the family put part of that money into an internet service provider, run day to day by Erol's son Orhan out of the same Springfield headquarters on Woodruff Court.

The offer was one number a month for unlimited dial-up, at a moment when AOL and most of the national providers were still metering you by the hour. That pricing is the whole story of why it grew. It also explains why the idea did not travel: on a Turkish line in the same years the monthly fee was never the expensive part, the phone company's per-minute charge was, and no amount of unlimited from the ISP could do anything about the meter running on the other side of the modem.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The subscriber numbers read like a mistake. Erols finished 1995 with 6,344 customers. It finished 1996 with 135,378. By the middle of 1997 it was near 200,000 and at the sale it was serving more than 293,000 dial-up accounts across the Washington and northeast corridor.

What you got was basic and generous for the period: dial-up access, an email address, web space to put something on, and in the early days a Unix shell account if you wanted one. What you also got, and what the national providers could not match, was a support line answered by somebody in the same metropolitan area who knew which local exchange you were calling from.

~ the postmortem ~

On 21 January 1998 RCN announced it was paying 110.5 million dollars for two internet providers, UltraNet in Massachusetts and Erol's in Virginia, with 83.5 million of that in cash and stock for Erol's. RCN was building a fiber and cable business up the northeast corridor and what it wanted was a quarter of a million households already paying for connectivity every month.

The apostrophe went first. It was rebranded Erols Internet, then gradually pushed under RCN's own name and the Starpower brand until there was nothing left to push. No shutdown notice was ever needed for a company that had been bought, renamed and absorbed one layer at a time.

~ what the name became ~

erols.com still exists in 2026 and the mail records still point at RCN's servers, so somewhere in that system there are people whose email address is a video rental chain that was sold in 1990. The website itself serves one word, "optout", on a blank page. That is the whole inheritance: a working mail domain and a stub.

~ the funny part ~

At one point Erols sold a five-year contract for a little over three hundred dollars, which works out to well under twenty a month and was an outstanding deal. It was also a bet, made by tens of thousands of people in 1997, that in 2002 they would still be dialing a phone number to reach the internet. The company that sold them that bet did not last long enough to be embarrassed by it.

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