I cannot afford cable. So I have a profile on Mom’s MSN account.
I do. I rent and I am not going to pay for anything additional to have service hooked up unless my work pays for it and they won’t. So it’s AOL for me. My laptop (work provided) has wireless so I can do work if necessary from a McDonald’s or something and I can get web based email on my trusty old piece of shit computer at home.
Or, I go into the office. It’s 20 minutes away if I drive slow so it’s no big deal.
My parents do. I’m guessing right now they can’t afford cable or DSL. Plus, they actually like to have their landline busy. Mom has a cell phone whose number she doesn’t always give out.
I’ve been trying for the last eight years (since I moved out) to get them to stop leaving the internet and computer ON when they’re away or not using them. It hasn’t worked out yet.
I’ve been on The Internets since the early 90s, and I had dial-up until about a year and a half ago. Why?
Don’t have cable
Wasn’t willing to pay the price for other high-speed connections
Didn’t watch video or play games online or do other stuff that required high-speed at home
Some legal wrangling between the gov’t and AT&T a while back resulted in AT&T being told they had to offer DSL Lite for $10/m for a number of years in my area. I made the switch then and switched my AOL acct to “bring your own” access, although I never use the client app, just use the web interface for email.
If you don’t download or use YouTube or the like, you don’t really miss it.
I used to have dial up, but then by accident, I came up on SBC which offers $10.00 highspeed (up to 768kbs) per month. You have to climb through some hoops to find the deal and you have to sign up online but it’s been great.
SBC was required to offer the low cost high speed as a condition of approval of their merger with AT&T so, the offer is not available in all areas of SBC.
I can see why schools use dial up. Text is so easy to download with dial up. And while you can still get into sites like MySpace and YouTube, it takes so long to download it’s virutally useless for anyone on dial up. So the kids would get bored and if they tried to look at porn, it’d work but it’d take them 5 minutes to download half a picture.
But for studies and getting info dial up quick enough if you’re just looking for words
I’m still on dial-up. I get enough speed for most of the stuff I do online. Message boards mostly. I can watch YouTube videos if I wait a while for them to load. I will be moving some time soon and don’t feel like making the switch here. I don’t talk on the phone much at home so tying up the phone line isn’t a problem. My friends and family email and tell me to call if they can’t get through.
I have a separate line to the company door code processor. I have a voice modem to call it whenever I have to add a new employee to the control processor.
I was on dialup when I was in grad school (I finished my degree in 2007) because my university still provided free dialup Internet access to all students. I believe free high speed Internet access was available in campus housing, but since I was in my own apartment I’d have had to arrange and pay for it on my own. I decided I’d rather save my money, especially since I was on campus much of the day anyway and could easily use high speed Internet in the libraries and computer labs there.
I didn’t have cable either. If I’d been paying for that already I might have been willing to pay a little more for a cable/Internet package deal, but since I was supporting myself on very little money I considered more channels or a faster connection unnecessary luxuries.
I have dial-up. I live out in the boonies with the bunnies and possums, so it’s dial-up or satellite. Everyone I know with satellite hates it, so I stick with dial-up.
I don’t have to worry about missing calls, because I have CallWave, which alerts me when I get a phone call.
With patience, I’m able to watch youtube videos and download MP3s. Downloading movies would be out of the question, of course.
I don’t, thank goodness, but if I wasn’t able to receive cable internet, which is often a possibility in many areas, I also would not have ADSL where I am, as I am too far away from my connecting Exchange, and I have poor quality cabling at my current residence. So circumstances can be against you.
Unfortunately, this means I am forced to use a singular ISP, who have sucky plans at excessive prices.
The good news is the Australian Govt have put forward plans to have a national fibre optic network, which should be in place within the decade. Hopefully. This should give every home a potential 100MBit internet connection.
Both you and the UK, which is a darn good idea! I just wish Canada would strap on a pair and fork up the funding for a publically0owned fiber-optic network, instead of relying on Canada’s equivalent of Ma Bell.
Kilobytes. 8 bits per byte. 5 kilobits per second would be incredibly slow! That little niggling distinction bugs me when people use it wrong, sorry 
My computer is almost a decade old, and my boss lets me use the company account. I am a cheapskate.
My favorite websites are mostly text and still pictures. I use Yahoo for e-mail. If I skip Yahoo’s main page and go straight the the e-mail login page, it downloads fast enough for my purposes.
I am contemplating buying a new computer, but with all the complaints I hear about Vista, I am going to wait for Windows 7 to come out. And even then, I will wait until people tell me that they have worked out enough bugs to make it worthwhile.