I've been on ADSL for well over a decade now, but prior to that used dial up for many years. Somewhere I've still got my good old reliable USRobotics Courier Modem, flashed to V.90, originally having been a V.34 28.8 kbaud device (on a good day!).
I think, since I got ADSL, I've used dialup twice, once just to prove I could use Zen's fall back dialup service, and once overseas, before WiFi was common in hotels, to talk back to College's dialup pool. I'm not sure whether either of those dialup systems still exist, since I've had no need to use either of them since.
Even at home now, should the ADSL fail, I'd just pull out the tablet, and use it's 3G connection to get online.
High speed connections (of varying degrees) are now so ubiquitous, that most of us are unlikely to need to use dialup, as the article says, and I'd suspect that the number of people who have no alternative is now a tiny fraction of the population. I can't say that I miss dialup, whilst there was a certain kick to hearing the V.34 and V.90 negotiation, it took a while, and was also incredibly irritating, when you heard that it was barfing for some reason, and got multiple repetitions of the sequence whilst the two ends tried to come to an agreement over what the line was doing!
I'm quite happy to see the back end of acoustic couplers and 300 baud modems though. Imagine trying to access one of today's Shockwave and image rich web pages, using a 300 baud link!
