What is on Your Mind?

Does anyone still use modems for anything? Every now and then I see a web site that offers low res video for dial-up users. I wonder if any dial-up users still exist. But even if you have a wide band Internet connection,you might still use a modem for something else.

For the purposes of this question, a modem is used to convert a bitstream to/from an audio signal, and the audio signal is then used to send data over a dial-up land-based phone line. No fair counting cable-modems or anything like that.

There are lots and lots and lots of dialup users in this province.

Every couple years, this province puts forth an initiative to get broadband to everyone in the province and sells the project to the lowest bidder -- who invariably chickens out and decides we must have meant "only in places of highest density", then puts up another damned cellphone tower. There are and continue to be communities that can't even get dialup -- local-only phone service unless you call collect. It's also a convenient moneygrab for the dominant provider, cellphone access internet allows them to charge by-the-meg once you go over a tiny limit. It's even worse in Manitoba, where there's huge dead areas without proper high speed or cellphone coverage at all.

Not that I don't appreciate sites optimized for low bandwidth just 'cause I have high speed. Low-bandwidth sites load faaaaast, and just having bandwidth available doesn't mean I need to bleed it from every pore. Multi-megaton Windows, Mcaffee, Norton, and Itunes updates are more than willing to consume all that bandwidth for you these days before you even open a web browser, and people are feeling the crunch due to new bandwidth laws and such, not just here but in a few places. And on days when our "high speed" is working slow (increasingly many), they still load fast.

I've also seen people occasionally using free-to-air internet in some places, and from seeing how that works, it appears to be some strange sort of wireless dialup. Whatever will they think of next?

We have 500+ stores spread across the US (42 states). We use modems as fail over in the event the primary DSL or satellite connection goes down.
The credit card industry uses both network connection (Ethernet) and phone lines (modems) to do its business. Usually the phone line is fail over, but some small retailers use that as the only connection.
Large modem banks are still a good size chunk of the modem manufactures business, sold mostly to credit card processing companies.

This topic should be banned,just because of the effect it has on my blood pressure and ulcers.

While city and metro areas are well served, over 50% of the USA is lucky if they have dialup access to the internet. I have relatives that only got dialup in the last few years.

While out technology is second to none, many countries have better and cheaper delivery. (It is easier if the entire land area is smaller, and the population concentrated, but....)

Some secure transactions are still phone system (modem) operations for security.

Well, there must be because if you search a term like "dial-up access" you will find a number of companies that offer this service, including Earthlink, Verizon, and ATT. I personally don't know of anyone who still uses dial-up access; even my mother converted to a cable modem a few years ago, finally giving up dial-up. I am sure a lot of people still use dial-up, but no one I know.

I still see many small stores with the stand-alone credit card boxes, connected to a phone line. Also, at many fair's merchants will have these to authorize purchases.

I know of one family that only in the past couple months finally moved from dial-up to cable modem.