2.1M people still use AOL dial-up

My mother still uses Earthlink dialup. While she could get Comcast cable, she is completely convinced that were she to do so, no one would ever be able to send her email ever again.

Mom doesn't like it when I try to teach things to her. For example she asked me to make her email work. I required about five seconds to determine that Earthlink's mail server was down, so I decided to teach her to use ping herself.

She thought that was quite cool, but only for a moment.

"Mike, I'm very proud of you that you know how to use ping, but could you make my email work?"

"Mom, if you can't ping Earthlink's mail server, then your email cannot work."

"MIKE! STOP TORMENTING ME WITH THIS PING! I NEED TO GET MY EMAIL."

Consider also that in much of the developing world, they use cell phones far more commonly than we do in the industrialized world, as it is far cheaper to install cell towers than to run landlines everywhere.

Those people aren't using 4G LTE. They're doing pretty good if they can use EDGE.

Even when they use a wifi spot, everyone in town is sharing a single connection, which might well be dialup.

At one time, it worked well for my ex-wife and I to share a single 56k dialup connection via IP Masquerading.

What worked then, should work now; primary among the reasons that it does not is web analytics. It would not be so bad were I served only one single-pixel transparent gif. The problem I see is that it is common for a single website to use dozens of different analytics services.