[ecshafer]

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.

[paulorlando]

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]

Apparently this is still happening (although I imagine their customer base is rapidly dwindling): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLT_Consumer_Lease_Services

[busterarm]

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

Yeah it largely just worked.

[smelendez]

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]

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]

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]

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.