Not to mention those people who live in areas still not serviced by any broadband providers. I know, insane, right? I thought everyone lived in cities too!
In practice it isn't signficantly. EDGE peaks at 384Kbps, but these days if EDGE is the only thing available you generally have a poor connection that gets you about half that before all the dropped packets that halve it again.
You still need connectivity to access free email providers. And for older folk who do nothing other than email, do not have smartphones, but do have a landline... 20 a month on dialup makes more sense than 50 a month for Comcast.
Sure, it sounds ridiculous to us who are permanently connected and do not even have landlines... but to the 65+ community, there really still is a small, shrinking, but real use case for dialup access.
He may have been being more literal than you think. I can name 3 people that were paying for an AOL subscription because they thought they needed to keep it to keep using their AOL e-mail addresses. They all had broadband from their cable companies, they weren't dialing up.
They may have needed it at one point. At the time I quit AOL, there was no way to keep the email address, and they did not provide IMAP access or forwarding. Seriously. They (very badly) practiced the lock-in attitude. I just visited mail.aol.com and realized that things have changed a lot.
