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Dial-Up As De Facto Standard
Oswald writes: "Over at ZDNet, John Dvorak reveals his thoughts on broadband. He makes some good points on his way to concluding that broadband may be a very long time supplanting low-bandwidth connections." DSL service to my house took too many months and five technical visits, and resulted in mangled service and work orders, haphazard billing,and an intermittent connection. Now the initial carrier has gone out of business, and I didn't feel like paying more for the replacement. Dvorak has a point, but for the 10 year picture, I'm optimistic for broad(er) band.
Will The Telephone Ever Become The Standard?
by John C. Dvorak
December 31, 1877
My nomination for "most foolish company" this year is the obvious choice, Bell Telephone. What a foolish notion, this concept that the public is interested in real-time audio transmission. Why would anybody pay for such a capability when they already have the ability to send perfectly functional text-only messages for a much more reasonable fee, via the postal service, or the telegraph.
While some of us 'early adopters' might think it's reasonable to expect people to have a telephone in their house by the 21st century, the fact of the matter is that it's an unneccessary luxury. For half a decade we've had the telegraph, the British have had postal service since the late 17th century and it has worked just fine.
This 'telephone' is an unneccessary expense for casual communicators, and will never affect the lives of most people for centuries to come. Real-time audio transmission? who needs it!
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
It's not the speed of broadband that is its greatest asset, it's the always-on quality. The ability to leave a large file transfer overnight without the need to get up and disconnect, no tying up of a phone line, be notified of mail as soon as it arrives, being available over ICQ whenever you want. For my part, the speed is just a nice bonus.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.