Real miss by the NYT here in not finding and interviewing people who were still using it in 2025!

jm4 8 days ago | parent | next [-]

I very briefly worked at an ISP long after the days of dial-up were over. We had some super old servers on the network. These things hadn't been patched in forever, the OS was unsupported, etc. I think they were old Sun machines and Sun wasn't in business anymore. I asked what they were for and I was told there were still people paying for dial-up and their accounts were on there. They weren't actually using it, but the credit card auto payments were still going through and that was higher than the cost of the electricity. Nobody wanted to mess with it as long as people were still paying.

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ecshafer 9 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I worked on a help desk from 2013-2016 for an MSP that served some rural telcos. A couple of the clients still offered dial-up internet, so there were a few hundred people with dial up at that point. They were largely people with very rural homes that they didn't even have DSL. They were largely older people. And they just made a steady profit, the equipment and lines basically just worked and they had a FAR lower rate of calls than the DSL, Cable, Fiber, etc customers.

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paulorlando 9 days ago | parent | next [-]

Reminds me of how AT&T continued generating revenue from renting landline phones many years after it became legal to own and connect your own equipment to their network.

	▲	sgerenser 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		Apparently this is still happening (although I imagine their customer base is rapidly dwindling): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLT_Consumer_Lease_Services

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busterarm 9 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I worked from 2011-2013 at a small regional ILEC that had some dialup customers.

Yeah it largely just worked.

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smelendez 9 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I’m curious what those customers do today. Are they still using those computers with antique web browsers?

Maybe email and Amazon are enough, though.

	▲	themadturk 8 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My mom, who used dialup as recently as 2019 (not AOL) used it almost exclusively for email...Gmail's simple interface. She had a very active group of email correspondents, but Gmail on Chrome was her only need.
	▲	unquietwiki 9 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I've got in-laws that use 12yo Macs; would not surprise me in the least if a lot of older folks were still using whatever box from Best Buy or a relative they got in the late 00s.
	▲	const_cast 8 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Judging from how Amazon loads now on modern speeds, I'm guessing Amazon is out of the question. Email should be fine... as long as you don't use a web client.