By 2001 I think I had cable service, and most people in my area could get it (suburb of Chicago at the time)
My mother has a friend who was an engineer at US Robotics at that time. I must've been 11 or 12. I told him how I loved going online, and he found out about my ancient modem, and said he was going to send me an upgrade.
I was expecting a used 28.8 or even 14.4, but a few weeks go by and package comes. I come home from school and a shrink wrapped 56k X2 Sportster is sitting on my counter.
The difference was incredible. Connecting at 5x the speeds I used to get was life changing. I used that modem for at least seven years before broadband came along.
Amazing how far things have come. I work at home, now. Late into the COVID lockdown, the $120/mo Business internet service that hasn't gone down since it was installed (like ten years ago?)[0], was intermittently down for a week, with some periods exceeding 24-hours[1]. I was already at a permanent remote work gig and though I could still write code, there were certain things that were impossible being unable to connect to anything.
I'm a cord cutter and this was COVID lock-down so nothing was open. With no internet/YouTube/TikTok/Snapchat/etc/etc/etc ... you'd think we were living under candle-light boiling water for a bath the way the kids were behaving (insult to injury, it was freezing outside, their mobile service was awful in the house so they were dry).
Seriously, though, there were moments during that week that I was like ... "so what now ... early bedtime?"
[0] Technically it went down once, shortly after install, when the service provider I had left had cut the wrong line while terminating my service. To my new provider's credit, they send someone out an hour after I called -- at 5:30 PM -- and fixed it without charge. They'd charge now, but everything goes downhill ...
[1] The reason I pay for the Business service is this reliability. I was told "when there's maintenance, they send an e-mail and it's late/over the weekend." My neighbors have lost service several times when I've been fine. There's "no guarantee service will always work" but the outage was caused by the provider botching a Gigabit upgrade that was supposed to be short/weekend/evening, customers were never notified about and ended up being a prolonged outage.