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Dial-up was already very rare by that time. There were already more 'broadband' (or at least, what was understood by that term at that time) connections than dial-up accounts around 2001.

Perhaps you're suffering from selection bias, either from your peer group, socioeconomic group or area. Or perhaps you're simply forgetting what time all this happened.

I'm afraid you'll have to take it on trust, but these were literally the first two meaningful results (from different sources) that I clicked on when I did an image search for a graph:-

Home Broadband vs. Dialup (American adults, 2000 to 2013) - Source: Pew Internet

Web Connection Speed Trends - US - Source: Nielsen (After noting that some others were taken from the same Pew Internet source, this was the first I found that apparently wasn't).

These figures are for the United States- although I live in Scotland, I never had the impression that the United States was that different to the situation here, and this essentially confirms that belief.

In short, this backs up what I said even more accurately than I'd ever intended the original statement to be. Yes, broadband *was* around in the late 90s (as I was already aware), but only a small proportion of domestic users had it back then. It was 2004-05 (*not* 2001) before it reached around 50% in the US, and I'd say Scotland (and the rest of the UK) were somewhat similar there.

The US is 22nd in the world for broadband speed.. Latvia and Romania are ahead of us.

Latvia is easy to explain. They have Doctor Doom!

The US is 22nd in the world for broadband speed.. Latvia and Romania are ahead of us.

The reason why USAian broadband is so "slow" is because vendors (all vendors, everywhere) only supply a product that is "good enough", and no more, for people to pay the price they're paying. In the USA broadband is very cheap for what is being supplied.

In other countries around the world people can only dream of having that amount of bandwidth for that price. Suppliers outside of North America simply don't offer packages that cheaply.

While I agree with you that they (providers) usually only give us a little bit of bandwidth when they could easily provide more, I can not agree with your second paragraph. It might be true in a small percentage of countries, but the great majority have been putting in Fiber To The Home and giving their customers fantastic bandwidths (100Mb/100Mb or 1Gb/1GB) for less than what most cable internet providers charge their customers in America.

This was not true in 2007 and is not true today. Americans do NOT have it better with respects to Internet bandwidth. As of 2010, broadband penetration dropped to 25th place worldwide. We are not even on the chart any more, we have dropped that far, however we still pay more for less, no its not better in the US.

We, USA, dropped to 17th from 15th in 2008, but at least the US is on the chart

Wish it were not true, but it is.

"Broadband service here (Japan) is eight to 30 times as fast as (faster) in the United State..." and cheaper as well.

In the year 2000, most Japanese had 100Mb/100Mb, symmetrical FTTH, for less than $52 per month. Most American Cable providers charge well over $50 per month for a promise of 20Mb/2Mb that is throttled (except during the speedtest) to less than 300Kbps/40Kpbs. So in reality Americans pay a heck of allot more for a heck of allot less.

1GB/1GB; And this from 2008, thanks to the Fiber To The Home investment started in the year 2000 with the de-regulation of NTT in Japan, "The Hikari One Home Gigabit service will cost 5,460 (US$51.40) per month and provide an upstream and downstream connection at 1G bps"

Since most cable providers push customers to the $100 to $150 per month range, well it only is worse for Americans, not better. If you think its better, well their marketing works doesn't it.

If you can not get FTTH, only purchase DSL, do NOT purchase cable internet as they have always and will continue to always rip off consumers with higher prices for less service...its their business model, no matter what promises they have made over the years to provide Fiber. They will not unless forced to.

One day we may have it cheaper, but that day is not today...nor has it been for the last two decades. Here is a map that shows you were you can move to in order to get Fiber To The Home (FTTH). Well worth it if the bank took your home as those communities are creating better paying jobs faster than other communities in the US.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/11/21/web-pages-getting-bloated-here-is-why/

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/average-web-page/

Eh, it's only 1MB (which is actually quite large considering uncompressed would be 1.8MB by my estimate). Given how carelessly pages are designed these days, you're probably saving 100+ requests and 1MB of data by them not linking the page...

But hey, you don't have to listen to me; check out http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/
Total HTTP Requests: 312
Total Size: 1828125 bytes

Woohoo! Slashdot is doing them a favor.

10ms comes from the paper I read on the average page load time (latency) increase for https vs http.

Amazon's page load time is not limited by https. They have far worse problems for first load. I used http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/ to pull down www.amazon.com.

Total HTTP Requests: 69
Total Size: 445054 bytes

445kbytes is going to take several seconds just to download if you get 1mbps to their CDN servers.

To answer your original question, yes, I know how performance oriented big sites are. I work for one.

I don't see these price fluctuations at all. It may be that I'm smart enough to negotiate instead of just accepting the advertised price.

But unless you have a brand new ISP trying to break into the market on new infrastructure (I doubt it, though I'd like to hear if it's true) this type of thing won't happen. We're not talking about Verizon vs. Comcast, we're talking Comcast vs. NewCo (some theoretical startup).

There is always a better deal waiting for you if you're willing to walk away. Fools forget that, then bitch that they pay too much.

And this again underscores the big problem when it comes to broadband in the US. There isn't always somewhere to walk away to, because of the local monopolies. In the US we're lucky to have 3 choices for ISP (a DSL, Cable, and maybe Fiber), and each are a large company providing different levels of service. The ISPs know that it's unlikely people will leave in large numbers, because there is no better deal for similar service available to them.

In Europe and elsewhere it's common to have 5 ISPs sharing the infrastructure, meaning that it's possible to get up and walk away and have actual competition amongst the companies instead of the token competition we have now. That's why the UK pays roughly 50% the US average per MBps source.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0711/oecd-broadband-speed-country.png

First link from yahoo for canada broadband penetration shows that Canada has historically always led the US.

And unlike many of the US stats that have been used by the ISPs in the states when they try to claim they're doing a good job, that claim broadband for everyone in a 10k sample area if ONE person has it, the Canadian stats aren't the same.

I'd love to see a cite for where you get your numbers from, because I'm super skeptical of them otherwise. Remind me again why places like Japan and China should, by name alone, be the only reason that they have significantly higher speeds available for cheaper than we do here? Oh right, it's because they introduced competition. Meanwhile we're still way behind on installing fiber, etc due to franchise agreements in the US which are killing competition.

Example: metropolitan areas have higher densities than japan or china, yet the max connection speeds available are significantly slower and more expensive. There's no excuse for this. Chicago should have some of the fastest internet for the public in the world on density alone, and yet only the universities and colleges have the kind of speeds the public *should*.

Example: Japan's population density vs Chicago's.

If they were foreign they'd have to offer considerably better service for a lower price.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0905/

... and 30% presumably have no internet access. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0906/

That reminds me of this article on CSS sprites

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/css-sprites/

The idea is that you groupt a bunch of small images into one large one and use background-position to select the right one.

South Koreans consume LOTS of bandwidth just watching "broadcasting" and films/"pirated" DVDs. Probably there is little crackdown on at least the piracy of DVDs and related material because ultimately sales downstream probably depend upon or are enhanced by it. Plus, in the South, there are seriously dedicated gamers who'd probably put to shame just about any of the rest of the world.

The Bandwidth Capital of the World
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.08/korea.html

Korea Broadband Archives (12)
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/broadband/korea/

Who Wants To Watch Full Length Movies On Their Mobile Phones?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080401/105208716.shtml

south korea, bandwidth
http://www.zdnetasia.com/tags/south-korea+bandwidth/

Until and unless US bandwidth consumers need or demand higher speed and quality and demand it for reasonable (to consumer, not to the execs/investors or excessive R&D or boondoggling) pricing, people here will just shrug it off.

Afterall, don't forget:

Two-thirds of Americans without broadband don't want it
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/01/two-thirds-of-americans-without-broadband-dont-want-it.ars

Most Americans without broadband don't want it
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/23/poll_most_without_broadband_dont_want_it/

(Captcha: maleness)

It's not just the music tax that would be bad, it's almost all of them.

That's strange. In Denmark, if you work full time at minimum wage, you're paying at least 40% of what you earn in taxes. Get a well-paid Code Monkey position and you're looking at something like 50-60%. On top of that, there's 25% sales tax added to everything (meaning 20% of what you pay for goods is sales tax). And there's heavy charges added to certain goods, such as cars.

Yet, we:

• have good broadband adoption: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0805/
• score in the top 15 of Human Development Index: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index
• keep peaceful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Global_Peace_Index
• are about as literate as everybody else: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate
• live reasonably long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
• and still make a good amount of money: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

If taxation is bad, how come Denmark is such a great place to be?

What about latency and reliability? I'm happy with 3.6 Mbit/s, or even lower, if I get a reliable connection with low latency. Rock solid 512 kbit/s with 20 ms latency would be preferable to anything available in the mobile market right now.

I will be happy when I get 100 MB / 100 MB bi-directional access to the internet for around $50 per month. Heck the Japanese have had this level since 2003 and now in 2008 they are migrating up to 1GB / 1Gb for less than $55.00 per month. How far behind do we have to fall anyway?

As for

Who cares about bandwidth?

I do!

I still want the same speed upstream as I am getting downstream. Enough excuses already time to honor your promises to the United States government and U.S. consumers. (Note: While some of the telcos that promised no longer exist, I would suggest that the homes and area that they serviced does still exist. The business that acquired their area, should also acquire responsibility to build out that area per the promises that the telco that was bought made. I would suggest that they bought both the assets and the liabilities. I believe this liability, a public trust if you will, should be passed on as it is attached to our tax dollars, fees-still-being-charged every month and government funding and therefore should not be ignored because the business was purchased and/or acquired....my .02 cents)

As of 2008, no US customers have the 45 Mbps bidirectional service to our homes and you guys promised to have 86 million customers receiving 45 Mbps by 2006. And certainly not for the expected cost of .50 cents per 1 Mbps of bi-directional bandwidth.

And do NOT state that you are providing high speed access to consumers based on the FCC definition of high speed internet, 200Kbps - try to run videos at that speed, high speed my behind....

Also about bandwidth, I want to be able to consume the total amount of bandwidth that I am (and have been) actually paying for. It's not my fault that the telcos and internet providers have taken money from consumers and the U.S. government (estimated at over $200 billion since early 1990s in the form of tax breaks; increases service fees and outright government funding) and used it for buying up companies rather than building out their infrastructures. ( Funny how similar the telcos reaction to receiving money was to the current financial companies and banks that received the buy in / bail out money by the government recently).

I am concerned that the wireless providers will play the same sleight of hand with or without the FCC for wireless internet that they have been playing with hard wired access. Surprised they are not asking for tax breaks, money or a bail out as well!

Now for a question to those of you who say reduce the latency and than work on speed, because I honestly do NOT know the answer. Here is the question:

If you had 100MB / 100MB (bi-directional) at how high a latency (how slow could it get) until you were as slow as what the average American high speed internet user gets today? (Assume an average bandwidth of 8.8 Mbps downstream (I do not get that either, but it is the average listed in the articl

that depends on which European country you're talking about.

and it's not just an issue of advertised speed. it's an issue of quality of service--bandwidth caps, overselling, traffic throttling/shaping, packet monitoring & other usage restrictions. and all of these ultimately tie to _value_, which is what we need to compare.

we don't need to be faster than everyone else or as fast as Japan and Korea. that's not what i'm arguing. but we shouldn't be paying more for less. Japan is far and ahead of the U.S. because their government has focused on developing this vital infrastructure through government subsidies and technology initiative. in the U.S., we tax payers are still subsidizing the ISPs & telecoms but we're not getting anything out of it because our government cares only about business interests.

even BusinessWeek puts us at #16 out 46 surveyed countries. even countries like Lithuania, Latvia, and Slovenia are doing better than U.S. in terms of broadband quality. but more importantly, if we are to be a technology leader, or just continue to be relevant in the information age, we need more competitive broadband pricing. the current business model used by U.S. ISPs is basically preventing our broadband infrastructure from being upgraded in step with growing demand.

the blind greed of corporations is not driving technology forward. it's ever-growing consumer demand that is usually the driving force behind technological progress. but now ISPs are trying to suppress that demand by villanizing power users and manipulating internet usage. not only that, but the lack of industry regulation means ISPs can abuse their monopoly to artificially inflate broadband prices, thereby further manipulating bandwidth usage/demand economically.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

Breaks every thing down and shows HTML, HTML Images, Images called by CSS, etcetera.

a) 10MB is 20x 500KB; even my crappy phone line gets me 75x the speed of my old modem, so that site is still loading in less than a third the time of the old one

My parents live in the country and dial-up is their only option. Do you have any idea of how much of the USA is still on dial-up?

According to this site, it was just recently that the 90% on broadband was reached. Prior to June, over 10% of the USA was on less than broadband service.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/
For the first time, US broadband penetration broke ninety percent among active Internet users in June 2008.

Most residential Internet access is still dialup, and most of the customers are fine with that.

Not anymore

As a result, it's perfectly obvious that US industry has stepped up to the plate and provided the US with the BEST broadband in the world, at the lowest prices.

Are you sure about this business of the US having the cheapest and best broadband? This BBC article seems to be under the impression that Japan's got some pretty sweet broadband and that the Swedes tend to get the cheap broadband and this place seems to think that the US doesn't rank in the top 10 in broadband penetration, which I wouldn't assume is a marker of the best and cheapest broadband.

Granted, I don't know if the governments in any of these countries chipped in to build the infrastructure.

With the increasing number of Flex developers and Flash developers switching over to AS3 and the Flash 9 AVM2 engine

Check out all those flash sites that use papervision3d, a 3D software renderer for Flash. That's all Flash 9 AS3.

[Flex is] growing as an alternative to AJAX because AJAX eats a crapload of bandwidth since the Javascript code and XML aren't compressed.

Moreover, your front-end code is visible in AJAX.

you sir, are talking out of your ass.

While I feel for the people on dial-up or other narrow-band style connections, there isn't much anyone can do for them. Times change. While the majority of internet users in the states are on broadband(70% or more according to Web Site Optimization.com) . In my opinion it would be unfeasible to maintain two sites, one for narrow band users and one for high speed users. Those people in rural area's still have the ability to get high speed internet, such as satellite, direct line of site towers, cellular or even DSL.

Not at all. I'm claiming that the overall market, regulatory scheme, and planning are more efficient. The struggle over corporate acquisitions, wrangling for exclusive right-of-ways, and navigating (and manipulating) the FCC policies and congressional regulations adds a lot of overhead. There's a lot more to it than just running some lines.

Speak for yourself. The evidence is clear. Check out the charts here. This article points out a number of issues that are causing the US to drop further behind the rest of the world in broadband deployments (and overall efficiency, BTW). There have been a number of studies that demonstrate that population density is *not* a significant factor.

Oh, cool, I'll just switch to Cox. Oh... wait. I *can't*. Where is this "competition" you refer to? Doesn't really seem to be working for most of us.

First off...

a) Development focus. The telcoms in the U.S. are not just developing for NYC. They have to accommodate that vastness that is the U.S. moderately populated area. Often the case, there is a balance to be struck between high performance and range. The telcoms in the U.S. usually focus on extending the range, so they can reach more of that moderately covered area versus pushing for max bandwidth.

b) Older architecture versus newer. Why do many South American nations have no telephone poles and just celluar networks? Because, they missed the whole pole & cable era of infrastructure and are skipping direct to celluar.

Sure 802.11a was faster than 802.11b, but more people went with "b" because of the range. Yes, we eventually got 802.11g & n is on the eventual horizon. Likewise, higher bandwidths are on the horizon. More people will get broadband over time. But not everyone needs it either.

My grandfather sure doesn't, neither do many of my other older family members.

***

In 2004, 45.2% had broadband. 75% had internet access.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0403/

Guess what...that means 25% of Americans don't have internet access. Many of those likely have little or no interest in it. While a portion probably are hardship cases who can't afford it. But that's very few - as most people I've known on welfare have cable, HDTVs, and Xboxes.

Some things (like Internet) are more important than clean water.

response to government requirement that 20 million broadband lines be in service by 2010." Meanwhile I can't even get cable. Maybe it's time to move to India.

means far lower broadband penetration, than in the US (itself hardly a champion in this area). India has well over a billion people — more than three times America's population. Yet even its goal for 2 years from now is much lower, than what US had two years ago — even in absolute terms. Heck, India is not even on the chart!

Everybody, who wants to move out of my country, please, do. Millions of appreciating would-be immigrants are eager to replace you. God bless their souls.

Agreed. I use Time Warner in the NYC area and have never had a problem with bandwidth speeds, and am near positive that I'm in that supposed 5%. But as long as I don't hit speed limits, so to speak, I fail to see their problem.

The crux though, seems to be that broadband providers like Comcast and Time Warner are worried that more and more will move into that higher traffic usage population, and fear their infrastructure won't handle it. But instead of acknowledging the fact that the US, though catching up in broadband penetration (impressive, given our size relative to other industrialized nations), is falling behind in access speed and actual bandwidth, we try to limit its growth, even though demand for bandwidth is only going to go up.

As the nation which, for all intents and purposes, built the original backbone and was the major leader in the internet's formation, design, and construction, this should not be unexpected. We have older lines than many of the nations on that list, and upgrading existing tech can be very costly.

The bigger issue now though, is that because of our hand in the net's formation, we have a lot of sway in its politics. Moves like these set a dangerous precedent for other nations to do the same, much in the way that China's censorship helped pave the way for other nations to undertake such draconian measures. We should be a leader and grow in the right directions instead of trying to find an easy way to fix our problem and ignore it until it blows up in our faces.

Random Sources:

Breoadband penetration-

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0704/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_Internet_access#Broadband_worldwide

Broadband Speeds - http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2007-06-25-net-speeds_N.htm

Except of course Google doesn't seem to know how to add or it's missing a few elements. Out of curiosity I took a look at that 76k page (http://www.howstuffworks.com/web-page.htm). Firefox reports the HTML itself at around ~11.8KB. Looking at the media tab reveals several files ranging from 0KB (why are they sending empty files? mind you, still using bandwidth, HTTP overhead and such) to 55KB. A rough estimates puts the page at more than 76k. This can be further analyzed by looking at it through a website optimizer such as this one which reports it to be around 180k (more than twice the size Google reports it as). Note that 180k will most likely translate into a much bigger figure as it is stored in the browser's internal data structures.

So yes, the gp is right. Websites nowadays come with a plethora of objects that need to be loaded and processed. Most of the time websites are bigger than people think, even bigger than some web developers think it seems.

According to Wikipedia, Napster peaked at 26.4 million users*. That's pretty big in my book, and the impact was huge. I can't find any numbers for the iTunes music store, but I found that iTunes has only recently surpassed that number for users of the iTunes software**. Given that not everyone that users the iTunes software is going to buy from the iTunes store, I'm going to go with Napster still being bigger than iTMS. Of course, given the numbers that site also gives for Real Player, you might take those numbers with a grain of salt.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster/
**http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0702/

Also, ripping CDs was still a challenge for many people back in 1999. You were fine if you had one of those new-fangled P3 computers. But for those with older Pentiums and K6's with fussy 4x-8x CD drives, it was a bit of challenge to get a good rip without skips, and then the encoding could take as long as 3-4 minutes per song. During which you generally couldn't use the PC too. It couldn't have been much better on the Mac side, given the quality of Apple's gear of the time.

In other news, the US fell to 13th in broadband penetration. Maybe if we didn't have all these stupid regulations, it would take a smaller percentage of our income to purchase broadband.

The FBI is not going to catch Bin-Laden by tapping a phone. This will only cause a kind of Darwinism of criminals. Stupid petty criminals and you and I are the only ones who need worry about being listened in on.

Let's stop the nonsense and build our telecom networks on world class technology, not on the ability of our overlords to listen in.

we removed google analystics for that very reason. useful http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyz e/ tool to check what scripts keep the site slow

Web developer(a must-have) has a speed analyzing tool by default (well, more of a link to a website that does the job), I prefer to use that one. Here's an example of slashdot's report.

I thought the USA was comparatively far down the list, despite being big. It's only information but this article from 2006 shows America down at 20.

What's more likely is the country with the most users has more tech-unsavvy users who get infected. Either that or they're just more likely to believe the "get free [insert something here]" flashing adverts and so have a higher infection/takeover rate.

Here is the 2006Q4 data and 2003 population data from The Economist:

country, 2006Q4 broadband, 2003 population, 2003 area, median age
South Korea, 89.00%, 47.7, 99, 35.1
Monaco, 82.92%, 0.03, 0.002, 45.5
Hong Kong, 79.78%, 7.0, 1, 38.9
Iceland, 75.71%, 0.3, 103, 34.1
Singapore, 69.59%, 4.3, 1, 37.5
Netherlands, 69.38%, 16.1, 42, 39.3
Denmark, 69.34%, 5.4, 43, 39.5
Israel, 68.97%, 6.4, 21, 28.9
Macau, 68.82%, 0.4, 0.02, 36.6
Switzerland, 66.54%, 7.2, 41, 40.8
Canada, 63.02%, 31.5, 9971, 38.6
Taiwan, 61.40%, 22.6, 36, 31
Norway, 59.70%, 4.5, 324, 38.2
Finland, 59.52%, 5.2, 338, 40.9
Japan, 54.13%, 127.7, 378, 42.9
Germany, 53.23%, 82.5, 358, 42.1
Luxembourg, 52.29%, 0.5, 3, 38.1
UK, 52.25%, 59.3, 243, 39
Sweden, 51.76%, 8.9, 450, 40.1
Belgium, 51.73%, 10.3, 31, 40.6
Estonia, 50.35%, 1.3, 45, 38.9
Australia, 50.18%, 19.7, 7682, 36.6
USA, 50.07%, 294.0, 9373, 36.1

Population data is in millions, area is in thousands of square kilometers.
Canada would seem to throw a chain saw into the theory that this is driven by population density.
Copy-paste into a text document and import as csv into your favorite spreadsheet, make of it what you will.

Like, some actual data

Ah ... stop with this nonsense, I hear this excuse often when it comes to broadband and mobile phone coverage, but lets look at some numbers...

Lets average over a large, less densely populated region than the United States, but with similar GDP's per capita. I have for this purpose selected Norway, Sweden and Finland, a relatively homogeneous region. Adding the populations and dividing by the total area (from Wikipedia) we get a density of: (5238460+9127058+4695134)/(338145+449964+385155) = 16.2 people / km^2 ... compared to the United States' 31 people / km^2

Now lets look at an article which shows the broadbandpenetration in all these countries. As we can plainly see the United States lags behind them with its 50.7% compared to Sweden's 51.6%, Finland's 59.52% and Norway's 59.7% ... weighing against population we get a total for the three countries of: (9127058*0.5176+5238460*0.5952+4695134*0.5970)/(52 38460+9127058+4695134) = 55.85% ... which is 5% higher than the United States's. Not much you might say, but remember your argument ... low population density -> lower broadband penetration and we are talking about a region with almost half the population density of the United States, and with comparable economies (in fact I would not be surprised to find that laying copper is more expensive in the aforementioned countries.)

Now the population distribution could probably contribute to the problems of getting broadband, however I'm guessing that this would fall in the United States' disfavor, it probably being more condensed in places (though numbers on this is hard to find.)

Lastly I will say that an argument based on population density is not without merit, but it's way overplayed and I think there are other, more important factor to the US's lackluster broadband adoption.

How come Canada is doing so much better than the US. Our country is bigger than yours, and has 1/10 of the population. The US has a population density of 31 people per square kilometer, while Canada's population density is 3.2 people per square kilometer. If it's all about population density, then why does Canada have a much better broadband penetration.

Chicken feed. In the 2004 election cycle $1.6 billion dollars was spent on broadcast TV adds alone. Elections

f you knew about the public opinion on the RIAA, why would you take money from them? It seems like the negative publicity f having taken money would outweigh whatever you could do with the money.

Depending on your definition, no more than 20% of the U.S. population has broadband service. US Falls to 25th in Broadband Penetration Worldwide

Can you hear the off-campus voter cheering every time the geek gets busted for thinking the world owes him the movie fix that they have to pay for at Blockbuster?

The politicians do.

And someone always argues along these lines. Yet Canada has a larger percentage of rural population, similar geography, and has a higher percentage of broadband use.

This is about right. Cable TV hit about 60% market penetration by household in the US years ago, and has been stuck there since. That's probably about where Internet penetration will end up.

US broadband penetration is up to 80% of US Internet users. Some other countries are higher, but they're mostly countries which are either very crowded or very cold.

Can you give an example of a more decentralized country that has better broadband access?

Woah! Check your units--the 18% is "percent of the US online population"--so that's only 18 percent of people (or households? I'm not sure) that are online.

Whereas that "penetration" number appears to be a percentage of *all* (online or not) households.

No frickin way is it 18%.

Broadband reports has US broadband penetration at 47%.

You're saying that half of all broadband users are capable of downloading a bit torrent client, running it, finding divx, installing it, and getting the movie to run... sure, they could be downloading quicktime movies or WMV files, but any of these combinations is equally challenging to your mom, your grandpa, and your brother in law- 1 person out of 5 is a hell of a lot of people.

The US population is roughly 300MM. 18% of this is 54 million people. There's no way that there are 54 million people actively downloading 4GB movie files...

Free is attractive, but it founders on the seas of technical illiteracy.

Whoa. That's some advanced sheot!

It's hard-core science, too. Look at the scientifical results:

The report stated, "Some changes in muscle tension were quite dramatic While this was happening, the participants faces also tensed visibly, with the teeth clenched together and the muscles around the mouth becoming taught. These are physically uncomfortable situations that reduce concentration and increase feelings of anger."

I'm surprised that nobody has ever done anything like this before!

It's not good enough, but I wouldn't say it's "piss poor". It just passed 60%.

The GP link is slow because it's linking to analyze the utube site.
the parent url of http://www.websiteoptimization.com/ is quite fast, actually.

Maybe if they had less than 107 images on their front page they wouldn't have so much of a problem.

Or perhaps we could have the best of both worlds; plain text markup which makes web design and debugging easier, and some way that the server and browser can agree to deliver the content in a compressed stream.

Like this: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/com press/