For those of us who spend countless hours reading and watching video online per day, it can be hard to forget that there are still people in the United States who make do with dial-up. Millions of them. Fortune recently spoke to a handful of AOL dial-up customers to get a sense of what it’s like motoring along at 56kbps in 2014:
“As an AOL dial-up subscriber, Phyllis Brock can’t watch YouTube because her Internet connection is too slow. Streaming movies on Netflix is such a farfetched idea that she’s never bothered to try.
“‘A few years ago, I tried to watch the ’12 Days of Christmas’ on YouTube,’ said Brock, referring to the classic holiday song. ‘But I never got beyond that first partridge in a pear tree.’
“So goes life in the slow-lane for the remaining AOL dial-up die-hards.”
I relied on a dialup connection at home until around 2006 or so. I don’t know how I managed in hindsight.
