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http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/spl ash/

http://www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.p hp/id/3519

Meanwhile

25% of America has no access to the internet at all.

A further 30% of America lacks broadband, which often restricts how much one can rely on the internet in a protracted fashion.

But, yeah, sure, if America is significantly lessened in people that they can talk to, feel close to, or trust in the last twenty years, let's go ahead and blame the Internet...

The irony is that until BitTorrent, broadband was having a hell of a time getting people to sign up--because, after all, what would they need it for? And now that there's actually a "killer app," people are signing up so fast and using so much that it's causing a "backslash" (heh heh). Either feast or famine, nothing in-between.

Come on now, there has been plenty of bandwidth sucking software apps out there for quite some time now. FTP(among other types of servers) servers hosting large files have been out there forever. Putting that aside, there have been many P2P file sharing apps(Napster,Morpheous,BearShare,DC,etc...) out there for years that predate BitTorrent. And for about the same number of years, Broadband providers have been successfully advertising about the advantages of broadband for downloading music and movies(even before there were legal services like iTunes).

BitTorrent hasn't done anything for selling broadband outside of what has already been done. In fact, there is data out there suggesting that broadband growth is, at least in the US, leveling off. If you look for the data out there, price and lack of neccessity(e.g. only need internet service for email) seem to be the sticking issues for many people not adopting broadband. The significance of BitTorrent regarding bandwidth usage is that requires a large chain of people downloading and uploading at the same time, often for hours or even days depending on the file. It's not that a ton of people are adopting the program in mass. It's that the protocol requires a lot of bandwidth for it to be successful.

Really? That's suprising seeing that nearly 75% of U.S. households have internet access. (And that was back in 2004)

Went to college? More like the top 10%

So, going to college puts you in the top 10% eh? From 1990 to 2002, the number of high-school graduates entering college went from 60% to 64%. The percentage of Americans ages 25 to 29 with a bachelor's degree rose from 23% to 29%. Top 10% just by going to college? I don't think so.

I expect you must be one who has fallen for the scams the way you pull numbers out of your ass to describe the American public.

Well, that's not really true. You can look at this graph. From the countries that I know, 4th & 5th don't have unbundled their local loop, and I wouldn't call UK penetration rate "some of the highest in the world" either.

That's true - once you get over a certain dialup usage broadband is cheaper.

Here you can get cheap deals for £15/month. Dialup will cost that at ~25 hours usage a month - and it'll be slower, and it ties up your voice line (massive problem in families, believe me). If you only go online for an hour a day Broadband is cheaper... for most people (especially those with teenagers etc.) it's *way* cheaper.

But then the US is quite a way behind anyway.. it's even behind *estonia* FFS, coming 19th out of 20 countries for broadband penetration (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0601/top-20 -broadband-935x436.gif)

Hmmm, non-existent broadband penetration you say? If by non-existent you mean the majority of Internet users in the United States, then I guess we agree. The percentage appears to be around 60% of Internet users.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0509/

most people you are concerned with have broadband now

Are you sure that this is true? True, 63.8% is more than half, but you're still cutting 36.2% out of your market. In fact, if your application involves communication, the lack of network effect means that you're limiting your market even further, as users who have broadband need to communicate with users who do not have broadband. For a word processor, this means a compatible file format. For instant messaging, this means a compatible wire protocol. As network effect tends to apply quadratically, I'd estimate that a broadband-only application is only 100% * .638^2 = 40.7% as useful as an application that is practical over both broadband and dial-up.

...The US is now in 13th place overall in broadband penetration after being passed by the UK in Q3 2005... http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0510/

...United States, a large country with more vast, unpopulated areas than any other industrial nation.

Oh c'mon, can you really be so ignorant as to think that is true? You don't even have to look very far, just a little bit north, that country called Canada. The country American's have a tendancy to forget exists.

I've compared the broadband rates/pricing between Canada and the US, we have a much better deal. For $38USD/month one can get in Canada from Rogers 6.0Mb/sec over DOCSIS 2.0 (in practice meaning that you get atleast 95% of your theoretical bandwidth at all times). From BellSouth $43USD/month only gets your 3.0Mb/sec, $5/month more, for half the speed. That is comparatively a horrible deal.

The country with a more spread out population has cheaper, faster broadband! It also has higher broadband penetration rates, ~20% ahead! http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0506/.

The point of all this being, you can't blame the US broadband rates on your geography, it really is your political climate. As for the FCC, Republican governments generally favour business, so this isn't entirely surprising.

1) Is because it's full of all kinds of crap:
The following is inline javascript to convert http://start.com/3 -> http://www.start.com/3/ (can be seen by "view javascript" in the Firefox Developer Toolbar). This causes an infinite loop in any cache of the page (e.g. google's cache) ;o)
----------
var p = window.location.pathname;
var h = location.href;
if (p != "/" && p.indexOf("default.aspx") == -1 && p.charAt(p.length - 1) != '/')
      h += '/';
if (location.hostname == "start.com")
      h = h.replace("start.com","www.start.com");
if (h != location.href)
      location.replace(h);
----------

2) It's huge:
Total HTTP Requests: 47
Total Size: 264511 bytes
Total size does not count "externals" (CSS and javascript):
Javascript: 198459 bytes (why 193 KB of JavaScript on a start page?)
CSS: 49063 bytes
Taken from: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyz e/wso.php?url=http://www.start.com/3/

1) Because it's javascript you can't even go back to previous searches. Only the last search can be used.

Take one look at this report, and instantly your fears of an actual "hi" tech task force are calmed. (260kb for a single page?)

"There's absolutely no reason a dialup user should have a public ip address."

Unless that user wants to establish a P2P session with a [g]AIM user and exchange files or photos.

Unless that user is doing IPSEC with the corporate office and NAT traversal is unavailable for some reason.

"How many people still use dialup?"

It probably was. What gets me is why you guys pay so much for your broadband connectivity. For some other numbers on this, you can check this site which has percentages of broadband penetration compared to various different countries.

Eurgh! Not to mention that the total size of the homepage is 480kB (yes, almost half a megabyte), because none of the thumbnail images seem to have been resized from their originals... making them look like shit too! Yeah, love those jaggies!

That shit would be a minute and a half upwards to download the homepage alone over a dial-up connection! It was even noticably slow (seemed to take more than 10 seconds) over my 750kb cable connection!

I guess that's reason to be happy it was posted on Slashdot, because their bandwidth useage must have just gone through the roof in the last 24 hours... muahaha! (Had to do server-refresh a few times just make sure I was seeing the most up-to-date version... LOL!)

Also, taking a look at the source code, you'll find they've invented a nice new <fooorm> tag, and my Firefox HTML Validator tells me that there are 3 errors and 142 warnings in their code.

I'd say it barely even qualifies to be called a web page! ;-)

I totally agree. If you're designing for a customer base (not a business base), you should NOT have html pages that are over ~50-75KB. I am not sure about the % of homes with broadband, but I don't think that it's over 30%. I think it was noted by somebody that the average user will spend 8 seconds waiting for a page to load. Even if a 56kbps user has a GREAT connection speed of 6KB/s, a 75KB page will take about 12 seconds to load.

All too often I see sites that make me wait, even when I'm on a fast connection. ESPN is a good example. They have a nice-looking and supposedly standards-compliant site, but sometimes it takes extremely long time (in a broadband sense) to load. If the site is bogged down and is slow to respond, I'll go check out another sports news site.

A good site for checking that your site is optimized is the Web Page Analyzer. The tool goes into great detail that may seem a tad too strict, but you can take the information with a grain of salt.

1. Clearly Firefox isn't made for you, or targeted for you. Mozilla is designed for a different audience than firefox - that's pretty clear - so there's no need for the elitist, holier-than-thou attitude.

2. Mozilla isn't going anywhere. You will always have a choice. Insulting people who don't agree with your choice makes you no better.

3. 10 megs is that much harder than 5 megs for people who don't have broadband to download. Firefox and mozilla need these people, especially considering Broadband penetration in the US is barely at 50%. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0403/

4. The majority of Firefox users are not editing any 10 page config file. It's doubtfull they even know that such an animal exists. The majority of OS X users aren't ever going to see a console prompt either.

So quit worrying about the US falling behind in broadband.

Actually, the Internet isn't that bad at 56Kb/s if you have strong ad blocking.

Canada has the population of California, a bigger land mass, and better broadband penetration than the US (source). Even considering that most Canadians live within a few hundred kilometers of the US/Canada border you're still lagging behind.

1. $60 for tv cable service
2. $30 for "high speed" internet
3. $10 to bump the internet up to 5mbit down/1.5mbit up

$33 USD for reasonably fast internet doesn't looks pretty good to me.

Most of the noise about the "broadband penetration problem" comes from telcos who want a monopoly over the local loop. There really is no "broadband penetration problem." So quit worrying about this.

There are millions of people out there satisfied with their 56K modems. Since the US has flat-rate local calls, and the dial-up infrastructure in place is quite good, many of them see no reason to upgrade. It's amusing that 5-7% of US Internet users are still on 14.4Kb/s modems, and that's been roughly constant for five years.

It seems like my post was seen like a bit of a flamebait. Lots of people answered with their personal experiences, apparently missing the point that we're talking about broadband. Here's food for thought.

Sorry if the original post went too far . :)

To start with, I'm having a hard time understanding how was that "propaganda". I think you're confusing "increase in penetration rate" (which is what the article is all about) with "total penetration rate".

Moreover, you're confusing "broadband access" with "internet access". You're talking quantity, I'm talking quality. And just so you can see where I'm comming, those 75%ish where you're comparing the US and Sweden... in Sweden you'll be hard pressed to find a non-broadband access - you should give it some further thought.

Read the report U.S. a Generation Behind in High-Speed Broadband instead of just reading BBC news.

I don't know where you get your facts, but 40% have broadband and there are more women than men using the interent (at any speed).

Unfortunately, most of the broadband connections don't have enough bandwidth for good NTSC video, let alone HDTV.

That number climbs steadily by about 12% per year. 40% back in late 2003, 53% this month, 80% around summer 2006. It's happening, and fast.

About 60% of US TV viewers have cable TV. It took the cable TV industry decades to reach that number, and they've been stuck there since the '80s. Broadband penetration will pass cable TV penetration next year. More people in the US have Internet connections (75%) than read newspapers (41%).

There's no need for a public policy change to "encourage broadband". It's happening faster than any Government intervention could make it happen.

First, in the US broadband passed modems last month. The trend is steady and that number should pass 80% within two years.

Second, because the US has free local calling, good line quality, and plenty of telco switch capacity, dialup works well in the US. In many countries, dialup involves per-minute costs, and you can't stay on all day. It the US, it's been flat-rate monthly for years. And dial-up is really cheap.

Third, more people in the US have Internet access than buy books or subscribe to newspapers. The literate fraction of the population is already on line. If you can't read, even AOL isn't useful.

What's the problem?

Second, US broadband penetration, as a fraction of Internet users, passed 50% some time this month. It was at 49.48% last month. That number is climbing steadily at 10-15% per year. Within two years it will pass cable TV penetration, stuck at 66% for years. This number is projected to pass 80% in 2006. We don't need to do anything to encourage broadband; it's already happened.

The US still has a huge population of dialup users. Remember, the US has flat-rate wireline local phone calls; most of the world charges per minute. So dialup is very cost-effective in the US. And 56Kb/s isn't bad for web surfing. 10% of users are still using modems slower than 56Kb/s. Around 4% are still at 14.4Kb/s, a number that's held steady for five years. So there's a small customer base that doesn't feel the need for speed at all. And a big customer base that doesn't want to pay $50 per month for broadband. Dial-up access starts, after all, under $5 per month.

So there is no "broadband penetration problem". It's over.

Where the US is behind is in bandwidth for "broadband" users. A sizable fraction of US broadband users have sub-megabit speeds, and very few have enough bandwidth for HDTV.

Been done. Apparently, Photoshop has this "feature" implemented; it's an option in its "Save for Web" dialog. (There's a link in another branch of this discussion thread, but to save you time, you can look at this page for the info.) I guess this is useful for web developers who want to shave a few KB off each image file, but for the kinds of things you'd use GIF or PNG for, I can't imagine that this would be very beneficial.

FWIW, it looks like Photoshop already supports lossy compression for GIFs and PNGs. I wonder if the Gimp will get it one day.

"Unix shell accounts used to be easy to find..."

My guess as to why they're harder to find now- Lack of demand. Broadband is far more available (or available period) compared to 5 years ago.

As of May of this year 48.61% of U.S. homes who regularly use the Internet have broadband.

Why pay another monthly fee when you can just throw up some hardware of your own on your home network that you can use without restriction. (Other than running say a web server on your cable modem, but if you want to SSH home and mucky muck around, no one is stopping you.)

For all the computer nerds without broadband, there are a few providers out there, but don't expect much competition when it comes to pricing/options.

According to this site 75% of homes have internet access and 48.6% of them have broadband. That works out to 36% of Americans who have broadband at Home.

Probably 75% of computer users out there aren't even aware what a web browser is,

US Broadband Penetration Jumps to 45.2% - US Internet Penetration Nearly 75% - March 2004 Bandwidth Report ...depending on one's belief in damned statistics. But I tend to agree that Ma and Pa don't pay attention to http vs. https.

I call bullshit: one, two, three, four, many more. Perhaps your statistic about Denmark is true (I don't know) but you must have pulled the first figure out of your ass, and your wild speculations have no other ties to reality. Sorry.

For comparison, only about 40% of US households bought a book in the last year. So broadband has already passed books. Only 21% of US households subscribe to a newspaper, while about 75% of Americans with a phone line have Internet access. Only 66% of US households subscribe to cable TV, so the Internet has already passed cable TV. Cable TV isn't growing, so, if you take the trends seriously, broadband Internet will pass cable TV within two years.

What's the problem?

broadband...Where is it?

It's in Canada. Canada far outpaces the US for broadband connectivity for home users, but I'm not sure why. Currently about 64% of Canadians with internet access have a broadband connection, around double the figure in the US. Welcome to Canada, the new home of the free.

broadband stats

Andrew King's book Speed Up Your Site is the most enlightening book I've read in a year; well organised, well structured, readable, teeming with useful information, and it's published by New Riders. Eric Meyer on CSS, also New Riders, comes a close second. Rule of thumb, there's dog food in any stable.