Great, so those living in ultra-rural areas because they can鈥檛 afford anything better will now have to pony up 10x the cost for satellite Internet, or become even more disconnected from the rest of the world than they already are.
According to this, as of 2022, in the US, only 175k households were still using dial-up Internet service from any provider. That鈥檚 not a lot of people.
https://www.reviews.org/internet-service/how-many-us-households-are-without-internet-connection/
Around 175,522 households use dial-up internet at home.
I鈥檓 guessing that many of those realistically have other landline options and just haven鈥檛 switched.
kagis
The amusingly-named-given-the-context dslextreme.com apparently continues to offer nationwide dial-up service.
https://www.dslextreme.com/dialup/residential
I suppose that someone who was determined to use dial-up access and didn鈥檛 want some form of wireless service and didn鈥檛 want or couldn鈥檛 get access to non-POTS landline service and had been using AOL could switch to them.
EDIT: It looks like it鈥檚 still possible to get POTS modems on Amazon. I suspect that that鈥檚 mostly for people using fax systems.
Its gotta take them a least a week just to load their yahoo home page on dialup. What are they even able to access on the web these days at 56k?
I don鈥檛 know, but if I had to guess: email, bank, & government sites are probably the bulk of their use. Those pages don鈥檛 change all that often, so once they鈥檙e in the browser cache they鈥檒l probably still load at reasonable enough speeds for their use I鈥檇 imagine. Those people probably see it as a tool to get certain things done, and that鈥檚 about it. They鈥檙e likely much older, and so never had much interest in being terminally online.
But I鈥檝e barely made in a dent in my free trial cd-roms!