DSL still exists to some extent, but while it’s better than dialup, it’s still pretty bad. Some use 4G/5G, but that’s still limited coverage.
Satellite internet sucked until Starlink. Bandwidth was adequate (though with severe data caps), but latency was horrendous: 500+ ms even under good conditions, and close to a whole second in less than ideal conditions. Starlink however uses low-Earth orbit satellites and gets a few hundred megabits/sec at <50 ms latency. Not as good as fiber, but better than almost any other alternative. Project Kuiper (the “Amazon Basics” version of Starlink) isn’t online yet, but it should be in a year or two.
In many rural areas you’ll see the distinctive white, rectangular Starlink antennas on lots of houses.
There’s a $40 billion rural broadband fund, intended to subsidize fiber, etc., but as far as I know there have still been zero people connected.
In 2015, AOL’s dial up service had more than two million users, bringing in more than $40 million in revenue a month. AOL, which is owned by Yahoo, did not release information about how many people use its dial-up service now.
2015 data is useless for our purposes. AP offers a more precise estimate of the nationwide market:
In the U.S., according to Census Bureau data, an estimated 163,401 households were using dial-up alone to get online in 2023, representing just over 0.13% of all homes with internet subscriptions nationwide.
I had DSL for a while. It was much better than dialup, though it’s not available everywhere. I see that Starlink residential costs $120 per month whoa- they just cut the price yesterday to $99 per month - the prices are insane! The cost of the dish is now $175, down from $350.
Distantly related to the OP–Starlink now offers a “standby” service for $5/mo, which offers 500 kb/s emergency service. You still need the dish, but aside that it’s a pretty amazing deal for someone with limited needs. And sort of impressive/amazing that 500 kb/s is basically considered emergency level service. It’s still 10x faster than the modem service which I presume people were paying about $20/mo for.
Here’s a possibility. Dial up requires, “Specialized equipment” otherwise known as a modem, which can be finicky. The tech support costs of servicing aging infrastructure owned by a tech ignorant user base might not be trivial. Part of that could be remedied with upselling to one of their ISP partners, but that business model has its limits as well.
I’m just shocked to learn that they hadn’t stopped years ago. Sure, i still see aol email accounts, but there are lots of reasons to keep a legacy email account, like, all your friends have it. What reason is there to keep modem-based Internet service in an age when that’s not very useful?
Most browsers have development tools that let you do this. For Chrome, that’s View > Developer > Developer tools. That pops up a tabbed pane of fun tools. Go to the network tab and select a slower speed from the throttling dropdown. The slowest one it shows is 3G, but there’s also an option to add a custom one – so go nuts!