It depends entirely on what is available in your area. It's possible AOL is your only choice for broadband, but most major phone companies offer it, your local cable TV operator probably offers it (although that could be Time Warner), and even your local phone company might. In larger cities, you have many independent regional ISPs. Prodigy offers DSL in most of the country.
Just ask around, or check your yellow pages!
I use a cable connection with Earthlink as my isp. (The cable equipment actually belongs to the local cable company, but my bill and e-mail addresses are all earthlink). The total monthly bill, including taxes, is about $44. In my area, AOL dial up plus a dedicated phone line would run about $55 - $60 per month, and that is for crappy dialup. Earthlink provides unlimited e-mail addresses, 80 megs of personal web space (compared to 2 or 3 megs on aol), and you can access e-mail through any browser anywhere you can find internet access.
I just ran a speedtest at http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest, and my download speads was over 3.4 megabits/second (compared to about 24 kb/sec at aol). That's 140 times faster. I love it.