How Many Americans Are Still Using Dial-Up Internet?
Our brief history of dial-up sounds so old-fashioned it might feel like we're talking about 8-track players or the advent of color television. But a surprising number of Americans still use dial-up internet out of necessity because of incomplete broadband market penetration. The U.S. is a big place with a lot of spread-out rural locations, and the wait time for that "final mile" of broadband network rollout has been in the someday-never category for many people.
In 2000, dial-up internet adoption was around 34%,
rising to 41% in 2001 as people's interest in home internet access outpaced broadband rollout, according to Pew Research. The rise of broadband more than halved those numbers by 2007, with dial-up internet only accounting for
15% of home internet use. By 2013, dial-up internet accounted for only around
3% of internet users.
As time goes on, it's harder to account for the remaining dial-up users because they aren't counted as part of official broadband surveys, but we do have some data to go off of. By 2019, Census estimates put dial-up internet use
at around 0.2% of households, meaning as of 2019, at least 265,000 people in the U.S. were still using dial-up for home internet access. This cratering of dial-up subscribers found in the Census data is also reflected in
survey data from National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Dial-up internet usage has been below 1% since sometime in 2015.
These dial-up subscribers use one of the few remaining national dial-up providers, such as
NetZero,
Juno, or one of the smaller regional providers that still offers dial-up. If those names sound familiar, it's because NetZero and Juno are still going strong in the dial-up internet space after nearly thirty years.