Wow... are you serious? Most basic dial-up connections here (in the Netherlands) are ADSL nowadays, with minimum speeds of at least 3 or 4 mbps. My cable connection is gonna get upgraded from 10mbps to 30mbps, and it's not even top of the line: just one up from the basic plan...
Yes he is serious and you should also consider yourself lucky - very lucky! In many countries including the USA, Australia, New Zealand and probably even Holland, people are forced to use dialup because no other option exists. Others are forced to by cost. Our local Telco for example charges AU$30 for 300 megabytes of ADSL2 bandwidth per month. That's about half an hour on YouTube for thirty dollars! I have a 3G Mobile connection which drops back to speeds much slower than dialup almost weekly. My limit is 5 gig for up and down, so just looking at the screenshots on this forum can eat up my monthly allowance in hours.
Although it's hard to gain statistics from our Telco, between 20 and 25% of all Australians are on dial-up. Of the remainder, 70% will be on ADSL speeds of 512kbs or less. The balance are paying through the nose for services that vary greatly. I see a lot of computers in a month and the fastest downloads I've ever seen was on a friend's cable connection in Melbourne. It got to 180kbs but quicly dropped down to 150.
Our main problem other that a slack telco is population and distance. Barn700 made that clear in his post, but take a look at Australia. You wonder why people from Holland would want to migrate here:
Holland
Population: 16,491,852
Area: 41,526 km
Density: 397 people per square kilometre
With thanks to Google:
Australia
Population: 21,007,310
Area: 7,617,930 sq km
Density: 2.75 (yes 2 and three quarters) people per square kilometre.
My home town Cairns to nearest capital city Brisbane by Train: 1,700 km
Amsterdam to Moscow is only 1,300 km
Perth to Cairns by Train via Melbourne and Sydney: 6,100 km
Direct route: 5,800 km
Amsterdam to Delhi in India is only 5,737 km
BTW, Australia is also the most arid continent on earth.