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Many Internet Users Happy With Dial-Up
prostoalex writes "With cable and DSL operators constantly pushing the values of broadband, and with the President of the United States himself announcing broadband access a priority, the New York Times reports (free reg. req.) that some people actually are perfectly satisfied with their 56K connection. In February 2003 Pew Internet conducted a survey, where they found out 60% of dial-up users weren't interested in switching, a year later in 2004 the percentage was roughly the same."
not everyone is interested in making first post.
just hit the article. High speed internet at work. Any dialups in the top 10 responding ever?
Most people don't wish to pay for premium channels with their cable subscription.
This boggles my mind, I couldn't live without broadband.
:)
I'd be very interested to see how many of these people have ever experienced broadband, and if their attitudes would change if they had.
I realize that broadband can be overkill for many people, but even casual web-surfing can be painfully slow on dial-up.
Oh well, more bandwidth for me
Me laughs as I look at my btdownload session.
Really though, even my mom and dad have broadband now, and cringe at the thought of dial up. Just too many graphics and complicated web page layouts these days.
There's nothing like the shear deluge of porn available to broadband users to turn one of sex entirely.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
...but have they actually had the chance of using broadband to compare it to dial-up?
Definitely the case of 'once you've tried it, you'll never go back...'
I'm not satisfied, and I never will be. It's because I live in the rural areas, so therefor, I must be happy with my 26.8k connection. I hate this place.
Sig
Out of those 60% how many have actually used high speed and know what a difference it makes?
If alot of these people had cable connections, they'd probably be easy pickings for malware, and become spam relays, anyway.
This sounds troll-ish, but I've never registered, so what do I care?
I would guess a lot of users are happy with the 'portability' of a dial-up connection - ie. laptop in a hotel room. Broadband may be ubiquitous, but not as much as dial-in appears to be.
Cut the price of broadband by a fair margin. These prices are crazy!
i remember in the good old days of the internet, we used 2 cans and some string and we were very happy with that. none of us wanted to switch and i still enjoy using my cans and a string internet connection
Thinking back to the days of BBSes and hunting for that 8.3 grainy, twitchy 'special' clip, how does one 'do' pr0n via dialup?
For most people, dialup is enough. There is no story here.
Ok, why is this a suprise to anyone? Many users do nothing more than look at a few pages and send/receive email. For them, that is the internet, that's all they want and care about. So, for those the people, there is no reason to pay the extra for broad band. When you can get dial-up for US$10/month a month, or less if you are willing to put up with ads, and basic broadband starts at US$30/month, is it really worth it to get your email a second or two faster?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
As a sysadmin at a small to midsized web hosting firm, I find that dialup is all I need. I have tried time and time again to justify broadband at my house but as a single income household with 2 kids and my disabled wife, I can't afford it and do not really need it. If I need something that's broadband only (Latest distro ISO or something) I login to my server here at the NOC (45MB DS3) and download it there. Then I grab it on my laptop the next day at work. NO BIG DEAL. Even if I did not have 45mb/sec here at work I would still be OK with dialup. Heck most of us just check mail right?
Seriously though, the most I do is check mail, a few forums, and some web publishing. All low bandwidth stuff. So, I agree with the story. Broadband is nice but not necessary.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
I guess these people never feel the need to download a full cd via bittorrent in under five minutes. For all the BellSouth users that have DSL. BellSouth has just rolled out DSL Xtreme which is 3mbit downstream. I just upgraded for 5 bucks more a month. Well worth it for downloading the pr0n at twice the speed.
not interested in broadband are the ones who've never used it. It took about 24 hours for me to patch my mom's windows 95 box across AOL, with the phone service tied up the whole time.
Totally ridiculous.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
need to keep these people from propogating their views!
Did you know you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
me.
I guess they're just not as smart as some of us.
I finally convinced my mother to upgrade from AOL dialup to DSL (with package discounts, it's actually cheaper), and she says she doesn't notice a difference.
I guess if all you do is read email and hit Amazon once in a while, maybe it doesn't really matter.
Why do I not find this surprising?
In a related survey, 60% of dialup internet users were found to be smoking rocks.
--riney
So at any given time, 60% of dialup users do not want to switch. 40% do switch. Next year, 60& want to switch => some of the original 60% must have switched sides to the 40%.
In other news: dog bites man.
Let's consider the users who do nothing but e-mail with their Internet connection...
- Faster speed is not much of a benefit to them. They don't download images very often, and they're fine with walking away from their computer for however long it takes while those downloads happen.
- They don't particularly care about their phone callers getting busy signals, they don't get that many really important phone calls anyway.
- To them, changing e-mail addresses would be a nightmare. Some are even clinging onto address that they've had since 1994. The ISP may have gone defunct, but the old domain name is still being supported by the ISP that aquired them. Look at all the legacy domains Earthlink is still supporting.
- And, we're also talking about people who hate monthly bills. For retired people, they plan their budgets very carefully and even a $10/month difference bothers them.
Bottom line... not everybody wants an always-on Internet connection. Sure, everybody reading Slashdot who doesn't have one wants one... but there are a lot of people in the USA who wouldn't even know what Slashdot is.
The 60% mentioned are probably just Joe public who just uses the internet ocasionally, or just to check email, like the AOL'ers. Thing wrong with using AOL if all your going to do is check your email once or twice a week or so, and to check something out. For instance if they see a webpage advertised in conjunction with an advert on the TV or on a programme.
Huff
Study: 2 in 5 Web users now have broadband at home
Well it isn't necessary for many simple internet uses like e-mail and such. Why pay the extra money if you really don't need it? Many times dial-up is given toll-free through job or university. Plus you have less worries about being hacked...if that matters to you.
MY SECRET DIARIES
The majority of dialup users are using the net mainly to visit websites and check email. That kind of content still is perfectly viewable at dialup speeds (and with proper CSS design can be rather full-featured).
Even with sites polluting their content with flash banners and the like, for plain old website reading, dialup might just be fine.
A majority of people on Dial Up dont realize how slow it is because they have never had the chance to use broadband on a daily basis. I have known people that were "Completely Satisfied" with their dialup connections, only until they got broadband and couldn't imagine using the internet without it.
Text only pages, or ones with minimal images, are even much faster on broadband. They are still somewhat bearable with Dial Up, but anything with a decent image takes forever. Not to mention streaming legal videos, playing legal games, and downloading pr0....gressively more material.
60 percent are satisfied. That means 40 percent want to switch. If you estimate that half of that 40 percent will actually switch to broadband, then the number of modem users has shrunk by 20 percent.
So instead of saying "60 percent of modem users are happy", you could just as easily say "modem market shrinking by 20 percent per year". Most analysts would call that a dying industry.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. It's all how you spin it. (i.e. no story here, move along.)
If last year 60% of modem users were satisfied, presumably a lot of them have since moved on to broadband. So if 60% of the remaining modem users now say they are satisfied, doesn't it follow that a lower percentage of the modem users who remain from last year are satisfied than they were before? For the most part, the ones who are still modem users are the ones who were satisfied a year ago, no? So why are only 60% of them satisfied now?
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
So, a year later, after many of the modem users had already switched to broadband, 60% of what was left were still perfectly satisfied. Sounds to me like that's actually a shrinking number of users that are satisfied with dial-up, not a constant number.
TW
Cable and DSL are not available in remote areas of the country. I think CowboyNeal is in this situation and, thus, uses dial-up.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
That's because they haven't tried broadband. I remember my mom was against spending money for dsl but once we got it, she would never settle for less.
The internet can be quite daunting and sometimes a 56k or 28k is all it takes to check email. Maybe people don't know how to use the web and there might be a need to educate them.
Obviously, if the percentage of dialup users wishing to remain is stable, it could be that their percentage vis-à-vis the total number of Net users, or even their absolute numbers, at least in rich countries, is diminishing.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
I started in the days of 300 baud/bps modems.
So to me 56K dialup connection IS fast
I surf with images turned off, Java & Javascript turned off.
I read www.nytimes.com, www.globeandmail.com, whatever
I can do what I need to do just fine with dialup.
Why not bring those who aren't interested in the broadband services dialup networking for free? Ya know, since they are so into torturing themselves with long download periods. I think they'll change their mind when their spam starts to take 3 hours to download.
When on the road I use dial-up just because it is readily available everywhere. A "no-subscription" service I use on occasion is 0,015€/minute in the low hours. It's probably not even the cheapest around, but I didn't compare prices. For 50€, I can be online for 3333minutes, or about 55 hours online per month! That's over 2 hours per day! Uhm, the regular surfer, doing some email, doing his webbanking is never going to reach that amount of time.
Yes, there is the speed increase... but does it really matter for them? Granted, DSL is expensive where I live, but before you take broadband you should always count out what is better for you financially.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The percentage of dialup may have remained the same, but the number of total dialup users has decreased (I think), as more and more of the country gets wired with broadband. So while it may be 60% and 60% now, it's probably more like 100 million then and 75 million now. (Numbers completely pulled out of my ass, but you get my point.)
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Internet accelerators like Proxyconn use caching and compression to help speed up dial up connections. It's not quite as fast as fast as dsl, but it's definitely faster than without.
...as I'll hazard a guess and say that the vast majority of internet users do nothing but check email, look at web sites and chat on IMs. Heck, if that's all I did, I'd be happy with dialup too. But I also like to download large... uh... stuff... like videos? Oh! And music! I actually just recently got DSL because after looking at the numbers, I was spending more for a seperate phone line with dial up ($23 + $15, respectively) than just putting DSL on my primary line ($30). That and it just became available in my neighborhood.
This is a common issue I've run into over and over again as a tech. Explaining to people how much better/easier their lives can be with new technology can be a battle. I've found that explaning new technology to a current user is liken to explaining what a pair of shoes can do for a person that has never warn them. Hard to understand because they can do all that they need to now without that pair of shoes. However, get them to wear a pair of shoes for a month or two and just see if they'll go back to being barefoot.
Same goes for dialup. If you switched those 60% dialup people to Broadband for a month or two then switched them back to dialup, I bet there wouldnt be more that 10% that are still satisfied.
In fact, take most new technology. I bet over 60% of tv watcher were happy with black and white and didn't think they needed color. Then once they watched their first show with a sexy co-star in color, black and white surely wouldn't be good enough!
scewed stats
A friend will come and bail you out of jail, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "damn that was fun!"
Some people will happily drink soda or juice through what is, in fact, a coffee stirrer. Much smaller than a straw, but it acts enough like a straw to make it useful, even though the transfer rate is considerably slower.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
But then again, when that happens, the only people left going to 56K will be the ones who have a need to access the internet over telephone.
The 60% number remaining unchanged for 2 years means nothing. How did the population of dialup users change? did it increase? decrease? or stay the same?
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
60% of people using phono LP players are not interested in switching to CD/mp3/cassette.
60% of VCR users are not interested in switching to DVD
60% of non-HDTV users are not interested in switching.
60% of tribals without electricity are not interested in switching (on or off).
Every year, they find that 60% of dial-up users are not interested in switching except that the number of dial-up users keeps on shrinking at a rate faster than number of VCR users.
:)
I never made the connection!!
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Why enjoy $40 broadband when you can pay $30+/month for dialup goodness and an extra phone line. Mmmmm, dialup...
Obviously, prices vary by area, but that's what it is around here.
...but everyone else in my area seems to be because none of the ISPs around here even seem to think people here want broadband. It's hard being in the minority when it comes to wanting broadband access. But there isn't much you can do except whine to the local telcos & cable companies until they extend access to include your area :(
900cc of Raw Whining Power, No Outstanding Warrants for my Arrest, Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee, Goddamn, The Pirate's Life for Me
Though you can still act as an smtp relay on dialup, try downloading patches. HAhahahaah!
I also seem to notice that the friends without broadband seem to accomplish more and lead happier lives. Their lawns are not 8" tall all the time, the cars are always clean and they seem to keep a more tidy abode. Coincidence? Hmm...
Now where did I put that Slack ISO? Ahh, I'll just download it again. While I'm doing that, I might as well go check out Slashdot or Fark. My grass can wait 'til another day. Like I care what the neighbors think...
Thank God for broadband.
Ligaguinggligagiggagoogoogwillgo
First Post!
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
Most of the /. crowd is going to cringe when they hear this, but I have a 28.8 internet connection. The way the phone switch is setup, it effectively cuts all modem connections from anywhere in town to 28.8 and eliminates any possibility of DSL.
Our cable company isn't going to upgrade it's infrastructure anytime soon to support cable modems either.
I've lived with it for years, and it's not all that bad. It's fine for e-mail and web browsing, and when I need a kernel update I just let it download overnight. Theoretically I could download just under 7GB a month, which actually beats some of your cable download caps! My only other option is satellite, but the hardware is Linux unfriendly and the latency is annoying (even more so than 28.8).
//Blessed are they that run around in circles, for they shall be known as wheels.
definite benefit of a modem: rendering porn.
when youre on some vanilla site, sure, it's torture. it takes forever for an image to render.
but when you get goatse'd and can close it when only the first 10 pixels have rendered... "priceless"
But you get so many more channels! And there's on-screen digital menus! And you can get a personal recorder! And! And! And!
Yeah, all true. All very nifty keen. I just have things that are more interesting to me to spend $360/year on (or, say, $10,800 over the next 30 years before I retire). However, I can't stand being without broadband.
I have relatives that just like to send e-mail. They compose off-line and batch-send. They use the web sometimes - mostly to shop - but often don't connect every day. Now they pay $15 a month or whatever for access and you could say that another $15 isn't much more...I'm sure when the difference gets down to zero they'll go broadband, but...
Advice: on VPS providers
This situation is analagous to watching Broadcast TV over Cable or Satellite TV.
If all you watch is the local news and the local affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC, UPN, and WB, then Cable or Satellite TV is probably not worth the cost.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
technically, since there are less dial up users now than in 2003, wouldn't that 2003 60% be more people than the 2004 60%?? Why don't they just tell you the raw numbers?
If there were 200,000 people in 2003 and 120,000 didn't care, then in 100,000 people in 2004 and 60,000 didn't care, you still work out with the same percentage of 60%.
I'd be interested in seeing the raw numbers on this. In particular, I'd like to know the differential number on the "didn't cares" to see how many of those switched to broadband.
I'd like to see the study of users who to switch BACK to 56k after having broadband for a year or two. I bet by then it would be a necessity.
TK
I've worked for companies with ADSL, Cable, T1, and E10 lines. At home I still use 56k dialup, on occasion (house sitting and such) I still use 28.8 dialup.
For basic email, forum reading and non porn related web surfing even 28.8 speeds are manageable. It's not fun but it's doable.
My home system is a P4 2.8Ghz system connected to the new via 56k dialup. It works for me and I have no need for high speed.
Any big downloads are done at work which is rare.
Now if we assume that some of the 40% who do want to switch actually do, what we're seeing is that the number of people who don't want to switch is shrinking over the years.
Add that in to the overall percentage of people *with* broadband, and we see that the actual percentage of people who want to use dialup out of the entire net-population is shrinking rapidly.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
Some people clung onto their old cell phone providers even after another provider started better or cheaper service in their area simply because they wanted to keep their numbers. Number portability was the solution to that problem.
Now, it'd be relatively simple to do this, just require that ISPs offer forwarding service for up to a year after a customer cancels, and the new ISP can kick back an e-mail telling anybody who's e-mails that the user has moved to them.
Of course, no ISP is going to offer this without the government ordering them to... but couldn't the FTC or FCC step in on this one?
Just declare dialup a Al-Kie-Ee-Tuh operatives secret network
designed to undermine the american oil trusts.
Think about it. 60 percent, same as a year ago. In that year, how many of last year have already switched? As at least 40% WAS interested, quite a few, I'd think. Meaning people have changed their mind in the meantime and now DO want broadband.
Having been a DSL user for a few years now, I can't personally imagine going back to a slow dial-up connection. The same can't be said about people going the other way, though.
:)
For a great majority of users, having a computer is enough of an issue as it is. It's a mysterious machine to them, and plugging in extra cash without knowing the benefits isn't an option.
Even if they know and understand the speed benefits, it's often not enough to convince the low-end users to switch. So the pictures download noticeably faster...then what? Unless they're downloading pr0n or swapping major files, it's not that big a deal to them. Unfortunately, this is probably the same crowd that won't wait for Windows Updates to download because it's too much of a hassle.
If you want to put the Linux vs Microsoft parallel to this situation, there's an analogy waiting to be used. People who are used to dialup will not move to the unfamiliar unless absolutely convinced that it's better, faster, and more stable. There's a lot of Windows users out there who are afraid to jump operating systems simply because they'd rather stick to the familiar.
Same thing with dialup vs. broadband. Some people will willingly suffer through low speeds because they don't believe they need anything better.
Of course the analogy breaks the moment pricing is mentioned.
I currently use Earthlink for my dial-up. I know that it's a helluva lot more expensive than others, but they offer great newsgroup access.
I must say though, I am considering a switch to Keyon, at only $25.00/mo for 1.5 down, it seems like quite a steal. There's only one thing stopping me and what's most likely many other people. We're cheap, and there was no setup cost for dial-up. Whereas if I were to go with Keyon, there'd be a $200 setup charge, and if I were to go with any of the other services, then I'd be paying a helluva lot more every month (the next closest around here, from what I can see cost about $40.00/mo).
If the high-speed services would either remove their installation prices alltogether, or at least knock them down to a reasonable ammount, then I'm sure that both myself and many others would convert at the drop of a hat.
Those of you with older parents or grandparents will understand. Have you ever suggested an obvious improvement in any area to someone twice your age? Then you will understand. I'm sure a majority of these people are older folk whose kids or work forced a computer on them in the first place. Some people are just resistant to change of any kind, and those of us who are young now will likely be resisting the modernizing influence of our children in 30 years time.
My parents house is in a rural area, with bad phone lines. They are lucky to get 24Kbps connections, and the actual throughput on the line is below that. If they could really get 56K connections (40Kbps, or whatever realistic throughput would be) they would probably be happy with it.
As it is now, with their shitty dialup, they would definitely pay for DSL/Cable if it was available in their area.
Switching providers means more than just cutting dialup and getting a faster connection for $X more a month. There's also a few other issues at hand. The main one, of course, is the e-mail address. People *hate* to change their e-mail address. I'm one of them -- I pay for a proxy spam filtering service and deal with 3000+ spams a month to an e-mail address I've had for the last 8 years. It's a purely psychological attachment.
;-).
And, the price difference is more than you might expect. Not everyone out there uses $24/month AOL. $9.95 dial-up is available from mom-and-pop ISPs all over the country, and some of these are even beginning to offer compressing proxies (ala AOL's "Optimized") to improve web browsing over 56k links.
As for the AOL users, they are accustomed to the special features of AOL, and yes, their aol.com e-mail address. AOL Broadband is $15 a month, on top of your connectivity bill.
And above that, there's just the percieved "hassle" of switching. They're relatively happy with what they have, and don't want to deal with getting a new service, cancelling the old one, telling their friends their new e-mail addresses, etc. etc. etc.
I wonder if number portability requirements will ever extend to e-mail addresses
why should I pay for it at home?
Dial up does everything I need at home. If I want an ISO or something- I download and burn it at work. I imagine there are a lot of people in the same boat.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Apparently the fact that some folks perfer dialup is front page news to the paper of record.
These people probably use AOL and think it absolutely rocks too.
After having been at a university with an OC-12 and Internet2 for 3 years, I could never go back to dialup. Even a T-1 seems slow to me due to my pampering on 10/100 Mbps for the past couple of years. The parent comment is right. These people probably have never experienced broadband, so they don't know what they're missing.
When all people know is one thing (in this case dialup more than likely through AOHell), they have nothing to compare its quality to except itself. Now if we could get DSL or Cable with decent upstream and under $50/month, that would be impressive. Locally here in Gainesville, FL, there's places like atlantic.net and I *think* speakeasy, but I'm not sure. They seem to be the only ones offering decent prices on broadband around. All the telcos and cable companies seem to have a monopoly on these services for the most part, so they can overcharge all they want.
When I read the quotes from the article, I'm seeing people who are 46, 49, 61, 74, etc., so I'm wondering if the figures in this article are representative of all Internet users. Where were the quotes from 8 year olds?
Maybe a lot of people believe the internet actually is faster with Juno SpeedBand, NetZero HiSpeed, AOL TopSpeed and such other software caching steroids.
I'm suprised the ISP are even allowed to get away with using the sentence "5 times faster" in their ads. 5x 44k (about typical "56K" connection) is 220kbps, but the FCC limits to 53k transmission.
$cat
These people will not be happy to miss the good content only available online, as there is already some kind of.
Thats because broadband is not enough broad and "everywhere" that companies who have to sell and distribute heavy content does not currently do it.
Thinking that a slow connection is enough is the same as not thinking about what next in 4 days, or maybe 6.
Humans should not refuse a faster and better way to communicate.
If you force a broadband on someone like a senior citizen or a parent - by say just surprising them by hooking it up - they will never go back.
Most "non tech savvy" people just can't comprehend how fast it truely is and how much time a broadband connection saves!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Granted I don't do as much development at home as I do at work, having a nice cable connection at home is great for downloading various SDKs. Especially when they get into the 30-40Mb range.
I like getting Apache's Jakarta packages lickety-split, and finding out why my implementation isn't working correctly can speed things along nicely as well.
I could live without broadband, but I guess the American 'Fast Food' way has had its impact on me.
I'm switching my DSL provider now, and meanwhile had to go back to dial up. I think that 56k dialup is more than enough for average people(less spam they can send). What really sucks for me is that if I leave my dial up connection on 24/7, my monthly bill would be really *huge*. I remember the last month before I got DSL, I had about 60 hours online and paid almost 100$. DSL around here is quite expansive IMO but much better, for example 512/128 costs ~45$.
Ignorance is bliss... They don't even know what they are missing... Its a different experience, but the 24/7 connection.
.. switch to broadband if they feel they don't need it? I wouldn't switch to a porsche if I'm happy with my Chevy for daily commuting unless I want a jazzy car with high performace.
So why would a user switch to broadband for just checking emails and browsing some websites if this can be done reasonably well using dial-up?
That's why all my loser friends on dialup whine because they can't get it and that's why they don't have it. Every freaking monday (like today for example) I get blank CD's handed to me so I can burn things for them from home. I'll just reach over and pet my airport and 3.0mb cable modem and thank $DEITY that I'm not relegated to the pteradactyl pecking on stone tablet speed of dialup.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
How many broadband users switch to dial-up?
Among my circle of friends and data-points, the answer is: Zilch.
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
Has *anyone* ever actually connected at 56K with a modem? The highest connection speed I've ever seen with a (nominally) 56K modem is 44000 baud.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I thought I had this all figured out a while back. I always figured broadband was a lifestyle thing. Having been a gamer for god knows how long now, I've always done things like keep my computer on 24/7. To me, dialup was an inconvenience - it kept me from being online instantly, the same way that I could flick the mouse and be back at my desktop instantly. When I went to broadband it was obvious that that was the way to go: always-on, instant access. It became a lifestyle change thing. I even observed the behavior change with different girlfriens over time: they'd go from "let's look up the pizza place on the phone book/yellow pages" to "look it up online".
;) is just impossible to turn my back to.
I actually observed the exact same change with my parents: They used to keep the computer off, as there was no reason to keep it on. If they needed something online (like checking their e-mail or looking at a couple of webpages), they'd turn on the PC, wait for it to boot up, fire up the dialup, wait for the connection, download e-mail/check stuff on web, and disconnect as quickly as possible since a) people could be calling on the phone; and b) phone calls were metered by the minute over where they live (Spain). For them, using the computer was a big barrier: You had to go through a long, involved series of steps before even being able to do what you wanted. Looking up someone's information was easier using 411 (over there, 003) than using the PC for it.
Once I convinced them to do the DSL thing, the lifestyle changed completely - the computer remained on constantly, all you had to do to go online and check something was sit in front of it and type - it was always on . I know that's the point of it, but it's a huge mentality change. Seeing the transformation firsthand was amazing.
The curious thing, I find, is the number of people in the article and in the forums here that have experienced broadband, and do so on a daily basis, yet still manage to resist it. Self discipline, cost, just-don't-need-it come up as (to me, surprising) reasons why they say no to broadband.
To me, broadband vs. dialup is like cable/satellite vs. over-the-air reception, faxes vs. mail (back in the 80s), air travel vs. jumping on a boat to come to the US. It's just stuff that once you cross a certain frontier, a certain line, you can't just uncross it, you can't go back. The always-on availability of information, entertainment, and yes, even pr0n
Amazing stuff.
-Jack Ash
I started out on dial up way way way back when the only access was dial up BBS's...like The Ward Board and other BBS's in the Chicago area. Then moved to dial-up Internet usage through Interaccess...also in Chicago. Through Interaccess I then moved up to ISDN connection...then finally AT&T came to my area and I signed up with @home/ATT.
I went through the @home/ATT/Comcast shake-ups, but I ALWAYS loved my broadband. Even with Comcast I didn't have much downtime and the speeds were just great. I loved it.
But now, me and my family had to move to St. Joseph, Michigan and the only high-speed (where I am) is this fly-by-night ISP called "Green County Cable". I mean, they SUCK. They are down quite a bit, and their speeds are 400 kilo bits sec...down from the great 3Mega bits sec I was getting when I was last on Comcast (they upgraded from 1.5 to 3).
Add to the fact that I'm paying the exact same price I was paying for Comcast...and it SUCKS. But even after all that, no way would I ever ever ever go back to plain dial-up. It's just way too slow.
I have a feeling that if all those people that are satisfied with dial-up were given a taste of broadband, they'd never go back. I know from experience my mother-in-law. She's been on AOL for years, and had no intention of ever switching. But Comcast came through her neighborhood and offered to hook her up for free for 30 days...and she's never gone back to dial up.
It's like the drug pushers...the first hit is always free.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
It's no big deal. I hear this internet thing is going to go away in a few years anyway.
I'm using a 56K modem right now to browse through /. . Its perfectly fine for browse through the internet provided the websites aren't graphic intensive.
/.ers are on these days
Downloading anything significant on the otherhand... thats what the uni's internet is for.
I'd like to see a poll on what internet connection
- No, I am not your imagination
You just have to realize that most of the people that are satisfied with dialup either never use it or are like my dad and don't know anything about it. Just the other day my dad accidently minimized the window he had open and had a fit because it "crashed on him and deleted it". Thats when my 12-year old sister walked in and "fixed" it for him. He has no desire to learn anything about money, and he controlled the household funds - I wonder how many of the people polled are like that, with they being the money controllers but in fact everyone else in the house is dissatisfied with dialup.
Start charging money by the minute like most other countries out there, and you'll see just how popular dial-up is. :)
:)
Cable/(A)DSL is a must if you want/need to be online 24/7. Most people might not care about the extra speed at all, they just don't want to be financially ruined
Users in the United States should realize how lucky they are - or rather, unlucky others are - when it comes to technology.
Cellular phone use after certain hours being free, inside a particular network being free, between N friends being free, free text messaging (called 'SMS' in most of Europe, I'd guess), etc.
The only negative side to cellular phone use in the U.S. appears to be that the *recipient* may get charged. Now that's seriously backwards
The real problem is that these people also aren't interested in running windows update, patching their systems, or doing many other things that "good internet users" ought to be doing.
:D
Maybe if it became a felony to have your machine automatically infect another machine with a virus, people would start wanting broadband access.
Cost of dial up service: 19.99 CND (varies but thats the average for unlimited us)
DSL: 36.99 CND.
Cable: 40.00 CND.
Everybody I know is on broadband. There isn't anyone I know who surfs the net regularly that isn't. Over here it's cheap, ussually reliable and unlimited use. Even dl/ul ratios ar elargly ignored. I did 25 gb last month and it cost me the same as when I do 5 gb. (I'm told if I ever do 50+ gb they might send me a letter to complain).
Fed up with your connection: move to canada.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
dialup that you all keep talking about? Your strange ways frighten and confuse me.
bad sig...no donut.
Stupid, deluded bastards.........
they don't know what they are missing.
Speed is only relevant when time is an asset. For example, many of the seniors I talked to when I worked at a dialup ISP had no sense of urgency about their web browsing, since they had all day, every day to do it. Incidentally, those sorts of customers are nicer to provide customer service to.
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
broadband = illegal downloads - music, films, software. and porn. so if you're a law abiding citizen, i can understand why you would see no need for it. but are 60% of dialuppers really law abiding? or is it just that the dodgy fuckers have already switched?
That must be good drugs they are smoking, I can't stand waiting for dialup, I dislike the sound of the modem even more. They must have never tried high speed. Once you go high-speed, you can never go back!
The main thing I like about DSL is the persistent connection. If I need an internet resource, I can grab it quickly...without having to wait for the modem.
The people I know who are staying with phone lines do so because they like getting all of their internet chores done is a single short session.
I think the overall download speed really is a secondary issue to how you organize your online time.
a year ago i would have been surprised this, but my aunt made it clear to me why this is true. I lived with my aunt and uncle for a few months and convinced them to get broadband. After i moved out they were pretty happy with their service. A few months later they had constant problems, most of which involved what appeared to be a bad cable modem. They started to hate it becuase they could only get online for a few minutes at a time. They just wanted their old reliable aol back becuase they just didnt have time to fix the new stuff that they werent used to. I think they cancelled their service and returned the equipment last week.
Just because %60 of the people on dialup still don't want to switch it doesn't mean 60% of the people who originally answered that they wouldn't change didn't. (the percentage might be the same, but is the number of people still on dialup the same? Did they just quit the Internet altogther?)
>how many have actually used high speed and know what a difference it makes?
I have a T3 connection at work. At home, my 56K is plenty. If I need to download and burn the latest Linux distro ISOs, download a 5GBI do not do a lot of gaming over the net, but if I did more, broadband would be a necessity. Also, if I lacked broadband access at work, I would definitely have it at home. Of course, that would mean choosing between the evil of DSL from SBC or the evil of cable from Cox. I wonder if there is service availavble from Cthulhu.net?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
I think it depends on what us dial-up users want. For me:
- I hate anything with FLASH
- I am not interested in movie clips from cnn.com or any other website for that matter
- I don't download music
- I don't online game
- I occationally download a pdf file from the DMV or other useful site, but when I do, I can wait for it
- I don't chat or IM
So yeah, SSH and e-mail (and the occational gander at slashdot.org) is about all that I use. Dial-up is fine.Some months ago my connection speed went from 1.5 DSL to 28.8 (previous local provider got bought out and my modem/router was incorrectly configured for the new provider, so I had to use a backup external dial-up).
It wasn't all that bad, actually. It required a bit of planning and no Daily Show video downloads, but it made me wonder why I was paying CAN$40/month for DSL while only getting double FAX speed.
Rotisserie Importers of America?
Yeah, right.
One possibility is that the number of people happy with dial-up service will increase, because those who are unhappy with it will switch to broadband. All the people for whom dial-up is perfectly acceptable, and have no real desire or need to upgrade, will remain on dialup. Eventually it'd get to nearly 100% who are happy with dial-up, because everyone else has already left for broadband.
Of course, those who are happy with dial-up may become unhappy with it for a variety of reasons: customer service sucks and they think broadband will be better, they find out how much faster broadband is and find a use for it, whatever. Or even those who remain "happy" with dial-up may choose to upgrade to broadband because it's even better, from their POV.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Some people say dialup users don't know what broadband is like. Well, a lot of us have broadband at work or school. And I think that's one reason we don't need broadband at home. More and more people spend their day staring at a computer monitor. A lot of workers use the internet to pass the time! After sitting at a computer all day, who needs to look at cnn.com when you get home? If anything you want to check email from time to time. Hence you only need broadband. Personally, I do heavy duty downloading at work and school and transfer it to my home computer later.
First off, I'm really bothered by all of the idiotic posts saying something along the lines of "I bet those 60% just haven't tried it." Why, just because someone doesn't agree with you, is it because they don't understand your side? Pretty egotistical.
Anyway, I love my dialup at home. $8 a month, always connects fast, and it does what I need. I spent 5 years in school getting a bs/ms in cs&ce and now spend my time programming/designing/etc 10 hours a day at work, why the hell do I need broadband at home? And why if I don't have it, is it because I don't know any better. Personally, if there is something I NEED, I download the s.o.b. onto my USB drive at work, and take it home. That saves me $35 a month that I can spend on other things. Oh, and, hold your breath, I don't have cable either. Holy shit, I must entertain myself by reading and/or spending time with my family... oh man, what a fucking looser.
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
Are local calls not free in Yank land ?
here down under, anywhere of A17~30Cents a local call, its makes a lot of sense to switch to Adsl even at a low per meg plan, as it ends up cheaper then a second line rental (A$22~28) plus calls...
If year ago 60% users were not interested in switching within a year, then 40% were interested and maybe did. Lets say that half of them did switch so there we have it, for every 100 users, 20 have broadband, 20 are still interested and 60 have dialup. Now is new year and new survery of these remaining 80 dial up users. But 60% are not interested, that means 48 users and that leaves 32 interested in broadband. Since last year, 12 more got interested.
In other words, even if the % didn't change, it still means that the number of users that are getting interested in broadband increases by roughly 12% a year.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
For joe blow I honestly doubt broadband will make any difference. After all, their computer's will still be filled with 5 trillion pieces of malware, spyware, trojans using the computer as a bandwidth zombie and so on. For the sake of the Internet thank bloody god we have a few hundred thousand less broadband users.
I'm a webmaster and computer programmer. Like Danielle Kolko in the article you didn't bother to read, I have high speed access at work and dialup at home. I had broadband at home for a while, when the costs were lower, but then I chucked it. I have more time than money, and there is always plenty for me to do. When I'm going to download large files at home, I load up a bunch of articles first and read them while the file is transferred in the background. Or I go do something else and come back later.
I get told thousands of times a day that I need something RIGHT NOW and almost every time it's a bunch of crap. Every time I believed those lines I ended up feeling cheapened. When broadband is the only option, I will have broadband, or perhaps nothing.
I had Cable internet back when MP3's were easy to download. I figured that all the mp3 downloading was saving me money. When the RIAA started going after people for running networks and sharing software I cancelled my cable access and went back to dial up for years. Recently qwest offered DSL 256k for $15 a month and I found a cheap ISP for $18. This raised my ISP billing from 21.95 to $33 and 256K works great for most downloading. I usually download all my updates and software automatically overnight using some get programs and file applications to retreive the software. Video and audio works just fine under 256k.
For the home user 256k is just right while 1.5M MBPS to 3M BPS with the added cost, around $53 in my area it is not worth the additional fees.
If Slashdot launched an article like that, then the flames would come from miles.
"If it's not broken, don't try to fix it" is the old adage that comes to mind. But no where does that talk about *improving* things, just keeping them the same way they are.
It's our fault. As geeks, we need to write more articles on why broadband will improve people's lives. We need to make the migration process easy for people. People need incentives, and sometimes hand-holding. Some things just take time.
IPv4 allocations for hobbyists? join the ipalloc-l mailing-list! www.operations.net/mailman/listinfo/ipalloc-l
I work 8-5. I sleep 10-6. I would therefore get 7 hours a day for most of the week out of a 24 hour connection -- at most I'd get 60 hours a week out of 168 that (A)DSL offers. Sure, there's plenty of stuff that I might be interested in downloading that could take advantage of the times I'm not there, but very little of it is legal. Anyway, most broadband deals in Australia turn crappy about 18 months after you get them and I don't want to have to hop from operator to operator every year and a half.
Now that i cant download mp3's, programs, and movies for free, whats the point in paying the $30+ a month? there isnt one. (The record companies should be sueing the dsl and cable companies for providing free passage on there networks to pirated goods)
I live on a 24k dialup connection (yes, less than half a 56k modem). It works fine wo me, I maintain web pages and download what I need overnight.
The main reason is not because I love dialup, but there are large areas were it is the only thing available (other than satalite, which gets rather expensive). The big cities may be all wired, but thats really a minority of the county. Most places in the US don't have a broadband option.
Most people how have never tried heroin don't see why its so addictive.
Bandwidth is a drug. once you've had it, you can't live without it. no matter how much you have had, you want more.
Captain obvious speaking: not everyone uses the internet for the same thing!
Some people need broadband. Most slashdotters are probably that kind of person. Back when I was on dial-up, playing games online was a nightmare. I'd have spurts of lag, disconnects, and a host of other problems that usually pissed me off, got me killed, or both. I also download large files, and on dial-up, that will tie up the phone line for a while. I'm pretty impatient when it comes to waiting for pages to load. All in all, I'm pretty much the perfect candidate for broadband.
On the other hand, there are people that just email each other and occasionally visit a website or two. Those people really don't need broadband. It's worth it to me to pay an extra 20 dollars a month for broadband, but it's probably not worth it to them.
Most people whom are "happy with dialup" don't know the difference.
With a modem, the Internet is simply a fun to-do sometimes. With broadband, it's another world. The changes are more then simply "it's faster." It enables you to do much more, and changes the way you think about the internet.
Going out to see a movie? Pop into a movie website and check the times, order tickets too. Want to find out how something works? Browse through 10 pages in moments. These tasks are a chore on dialup, and really quick and easy on a cablemodem. I'd venture to say that most modem users just don't use the internet like a broadband user.
My mom was the same way. Until we got cablemodems in the area, and I convinced her to get one, she didn't see any need for it. Now, she loves it and wouldn't have the internet any other way.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
But...but they can have broadband!
Link in sig. If you need a quick and easy disposable e-mail address, you can sign up for an Indie-Mail account without the need for an existing e-mail account. And with web-based access you don't even need to configure a client to use the account for taking care of registration confirmations.
And since web based access is text only, you don't have to worry about bugs imbedded in e-mails.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
chances are you won't. Becuase if you wanted broadband, you would have gotten it last year or the year before.
My parents have 56k dialup, and while you basically cannot download crap or play games online, for what they do (a little web surfing, check email, etc.), it is perfectly adequate.
Especially that evil one down here called Bell South. The same wonderful company that has recently tacked on an additional 3 dollars disguising it as a federal fee.
Phone companies, Bell South is by the worse, don't want to offer lower priced products. Not only do they want out taxes to pay to build their lines they want to charge us insane rates to use them. Everything about the phone company is extortion. Example, if I want Caller ID I have to pay about 8 dollars extra! Now, I can get caller id as part of a package of services for only 12.95 (or thereabouts).
What about their $30 a month DSL? Sure, 256 down! and only IF I subscribe to their expensive packages on my phone, like that $12.95 I mentioned earlier.
I truly believe the only reason the Cable companies can keep such high rates is because the phone companies do it.
I have given serious consideration to backing down to dial-up through a low cost provider. 30-40 dollars a month savings doesn't sound like much until you work it out across the year, then its 360 to 480. Thats many good dinners out with someone, some good computer hardware, or one motorcylce payment for me!
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Most people spell it Ferraris, not Ferraries.
You could have had every line in the parent post but you blew it.
Mmmm.. Donuts
What on earth are you talking about?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Most people spell it Wal-Mart, not Walmart.
When I go to wal-mart.com I'm redirected to walmart.com, no matter whether I'm surfing the web on dial-up or broadband. If the official spelling of the store chain's name is "Wal-Mart" or "WAL*MART", explain that.
Who said you have to do only one thing at once? I read slashdot while the other pages load in background tabs. 56K, and I'm never idle waiting.
Not only better things to do with our time, but also better things to do with our money. W'ere a one income family with 2 small children. I have broadband access at work, so I know what it's like.
We've got dialup at $12 on top of our standard phone bill.
DSL is cheaper than cable modem and the cheapest I could find DSL is $40/month.
Thats a savings of $28/month ($336/ year)
Sure, that's not a ton of money saved, but we also don't have cable tv or eat out much and have only one car. It all adds up, especially when you are working to be debt free.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
That's a HUGE number. How can you look at this as anything less than a tremendous market for high speed connections?
How many high speed connection folks are willing to downgrade?
If I were a dialup only provider, I'd be terrified.
"Ms. Brown, a former journalist, said that faster speeds would probably entice her to spend even more time in front of the computer." Probablly the same amount of time, but got to see a whole lot more.
Mark
Clearly, you haven't read that many Intarweb postings.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Example user here, FWIW. And I've got a 2MB line at my office so I'm well used to BB.
Whenever I look at it for home, though, it just seems a waste of money though. I honestly don't routinely use the net for much more than e-mail and catching up on a few news sites, none of which tax a 56k line. Equally, living in my current flat I can't put up a satellite dish - which means if I want digital TV I have to have NTL cable (tip - don't, they're terrible) - which pretty much comes with a free phone line. So, if I want ADSL it'll cost me a fortune because it'll come bundled with another phone line. And if I want a cable modem then it has to be with a company whose DNS server periodically can't find Google or the BBC. And I'd have to have a 12 month contract, and I want to move within 12 months.
No, modems aren't great, but unless you want to download more than a few megabytes or are in a real hurry, they're perfectly adequate. Just leave it sitting there, read the page you just loaded in the background, tell it to download your e-mail then wander off and start preparing dinner. Come back and they're there, all ready to read. So why, exactly, would I want to spend nearly UKP200 per year to get a faster service that I'd rarely benefit from from a company I don't trust to run an egg and spoon race?
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Does she want to switch from a modem to broadband? Yeah, sure, she doesn't like waiting forever for all her mail to download. Is it worth shelling out an extra $360 a year on a fixed retirement income? No way. Depending on the wording of a survey like this, she might well show up in the "not interested in broadband" column, even though she'd gladly switch if it was only a marginal price increase.
At any given point, I'm guessing most of the people who care about their connection speed and can afford to do something about it have already done so. Someone who can't afford the extra cost can't afford it, regardless of how much faster they'd be able to surf the web.
Cable TV
Cell phones
Personal computers
All items that a certain percentage of the population sniffed at as unnecessary when they first hit the market. In fact there are probably more than a few Slashdot readers who don't have all four of the items listed above.
But the point is that all four are now ubiquitous. They're so inexpensive and widely distributed that pretty much anyone who wants to purchase can do so.
There are enough people demanding broadband in the U.S. that eventually it will become truly ubiquitous. There may be holdouts who use dial-up for many years to come, but the economic necessity of broadband access will ensure that it comes about either through private enterprise, government intervention, or a combination of the two.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
i could see how many people (when factoring in the exorbitant price of broadband) would be perfectly happy with dial-up...especially if they are only casual users (as most are).
getting a 'base' broadband/dsl package is often around 3x (or more) dialup's cost.
now if they had a "basic" package which gave speeds around 4x dialup, and cost were to come down to say within 20% of basic dialup cost, then i could see a huge surge in broadband subscribers.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
Don't mod it down, you know it's true.
In Bombay city, India, the high cost of Internet access used to mean rations on daily Internet usage. Monthly charges used to be something like Rs 2500 -- ISP charges + phone usage
Last year, my father signed up for a broadband service. It is faster than 56K (speed varies coz it is a shared line) and costs around Rs 1000 a month. The savings are in avoiding those per call phone charges.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Well, being me a dialup linux user... Yes, I like dialup. And yes, I've tried 2Mbit connections for several months. First of all, broadband in spain is painful slow and expensive. And no, I'm not exagerating. broadband average latency isn't much better than the one froma dialup for example, because Telefonica/terra odesn't want to switch on some "FASTH PATH" option in their router (existing lines can't handle it) First, it's cheaper. Period Second, I got constant 5KB/s. I use a up-to-date debian sid, and I download some isos if i left it switched on in the night. Bandwith is more than enought for web surfing. Third, I move weekly to different houses, dialup allows me to be charged *one* time when I move, they charge me the same regardless where I call from. Fourth, I've no access to any broadband service *at all* in my small village. So no, I'm not going with broadband. Sorry.
Not that it is any validation for this survey, but I thought I'd mention an interesting thing -- I finally got my grandfather to switch to broadband a couple of years ago since he was always complaining about getting dropped off of dialup and the extra cost of a second dedicated phone line for the computer.
Get this, though -- he has 64Kbit/s (asymetric) cable modem service. I am astounded that they even continue to support this service level. He signed up under some 'same price as dialup' promotion and never upgraded to the 1 (now 3) megabit service level. While it is faster than a modem, it's still pretty eery how it creeps along. I'm suprised the virus problems haven't slowed the throttled connection down to unusable speeds. He's happy with it, even though, so what can I say?
I used broadband for a year. Then I switched back to dial-up.
My reason is simple: I don't play online computer games.
All I do is browse news sites and check email. Dial-up works great and costs less.
But, I admit that I am the exception, and not the rule, in this case....
People "satisfied" with dial-up have no idea that other services are available over broadband that can actually SAVE them money.
By that, I mean VOIP.
Voice Over Internet Protocol is the next "big thing" when it comes to broadband.
My cable modem + Vonage VOIP service is cheap. No dial-up ISP and no copper phone line means i'm actually SAVING money each month.
It's only a matter of time (and bandwidth) until everything comes over your IP connection - TV, voice, and data.
-ted
probably send/receive 2 to 3 emails a day. My dad has broadband at work and only goes online at home on the weekends or on vacation usually to look something up online and spends maybe 1-2 hours at most. My mom really doesn't "get" the internet and I've seen her use it for uses besides email maybe half a dozen times (probably to get directions from Yahoo). So I can easily understand that many people don't need a high speed connection. I, on the other hand, use bit torrent frequently to download TV shows on channels that I don't get at school, send data (10MB-2GB) from computer labs to my personal computer, and let's not forget my Xbox live subscription. It's a generational issue in my family.
There could be following reasons 1. People have not experienced broadband. If they do, they would be willing to pay more for broadband to get those speed. 2. People dont need utility of high bandwidth or they are not aware of what they could do. Like listen to music, video, movie on demand and so on. 3. PRICE - Leading companies charges very high for broadband. Price that people can not justify just to surf net (As they do it at work anyways). 4. If broadband is available at the price of dial-up, i am sure stats would be different. 5. If one has not seen something, he/she will be content with what they have. Does survey point out that off those 60% users how many have experienced broadband ?
On the front page, right now, next to this story is Ars' story entitled "Home broadband adoption up 60% in US" - This states some interesting facts: "There are now 48 million users with broadband at home, up 60% from last year's 30 million figure." - 20 mill. of those are DSL customers - also it states "DSL has climbed in popularity due in large part to price cuts which have brought prices down to the US$30 level for speeds of up to 1.5Mbps. When compared to spending US$20 for a dial-up connection or US$40-50 for high-speed cable, these budget DSL packages have proven to be attractive options.".
So the question remains, why aren't the dial-up users spending the extra US$ 10 to get always-on broadband DSL? I'm guessing many of the dial-up users can't get DSL in the first place. But that doesn't explain this article though.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
I've got DSL with BellSouth, DSL with Covad, cable with Comcast, and half a dozen dial-up accounts with local providers at my house. I manage web sites for several customers that pay me to make sure the site is reachable from most of the local providers. Of DSL and cable connections, none have a low enough latency to make them comfortable enough to use. I can dial-up to one of the local providers and it takes me 55 milliseconds or so each way to get over their line to their router. To get to Comcast's main local router over cable, it's over 300 ms most of the business day and up to a full second during the evenings. That's way too slow for comfortable typing. For DSL with Hell$outh, I'm seeing 1+ second ping times to their local router almost 24/7. I only have that connection because it's part of a relatively cheap long-distance package. For the Covad, it varies from between about 40 ms in the middle of the night to almost half of a second in the evenings. In every case, the dial-up, while it doesn't have the same capacity, the latency is much less. It's just plain faster. ISDN, when BellSouth actually would support it in the area, was even nicer. Now they want to sell a minimum of a PRI line to give you ISDN (23 lines) so it's no longer an option.
A good dial-up is so much faster than any DSL or cable connection I've seen. It might not have the capacity, but it's faster.
I would pay twice the going rate for a broadband connection if I could just get it were I live! There are still a lot of people who can only get dial-up. (And many are like me--no internet at work either)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Most people spell it Wal-Mart, not Walmart.
Most people spell it Macy*s, not Maceys.
No they don't, because if you hadn't noticed, most people either can't spell, or just can't be bothered when posting to slashdot. It's not a crime, you know.
Doug Moen.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
How about to download the latest release of your favourite distro? Or, if you prefer, to download SP2 for Windows? :)
Broadband is only better in situations where it solves a problem. If a dial-up user sits at home each night thinking, "Damn, I wish I could download fan subs like my friend George," then broadband would be better than dial-up.
However, if that dial-up user is like my grandparents and wants to be able to send and read email, and maybe look up recipes online then where is broadband solving a problem?
Most email I see is still in plain ASCII text format. Those messages require a tiny amount of bandwidth (9.6kbps is sufficient). The difference in speed broadband might give when accessing email might be 1 second.
And accessing those websites with recipes? I used dial-up for quite a while and I did everything I wanted to. I didn't feel like I was wasting my time waiting for a page to load. Even though with heavy graphics could come down in 10-15 seconds. For me, that was fast enough. For my grandparents, that's fast enough.
So if I didn't complain about dial-up's speed and my grandparents don't, where has broadband solved a problem? NOWHERE!!! Remember technology is only better if it solves a problem for you!! Otherwise why pay for it?
And yes, I do have broadband right now, and I wouldn't feel disadvantaged if it were taken away. To say that my life has improved because of broadband is silly. I still don't download fan subs because I don't have enough interest in it to search around for the eps, negotiate a connection with someone, etc. I let my friends do all the work of finding new stuff or I go find a good graphic novel. The latter can be done with dial-up and Lynx.
Do I need broadband? No. Has it improved my life? Not really.
It's been almost a year since I've gone back to dial up for financial reasons. When I was still in school and I lived with my father, he paid for broadband. I moved in with my girlfriend last summer and started working, my job was not that good and she is a student, so we went to 56k unlimited(only 15$CDN + tax). We each have a computer, and using both Windows and Linux, Windows XP dialup sharing did not cut it, so in came LineControl. Very practical, but people laugh at me when I tell them I have a 56k linux router, but are amazed at the same time. It works pretty well. At least we got unlimited internet, so when I download stuff, I use FTP when I can and queue up downloads with wget and batch files during the night. Some months it sums up to 350 or 400 hours of internet, but at least it is a flat rate. Somethings are a little longer, like my Slackware ISOs that took more than a week of night downloading. I have broadband at work (call center), but no burners, so not good for downloading. All in all, I wish I had broadband, but I don't and I live with it.
In some circles, it is considered not just functional, but an essential bit of modernity, like knowing ... that Diesel refers to jeans, not fuel.
/me crawls back under rock...
It does?
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
You must be new here.
If I want to load tons of slashdot pages all at once, I have to do it while I'm at work.
Most Slashdotters don't really give a shit. :-)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
68% of all statistics are made up...
At least according to Rocky Anderson, major of Salt Lake City.
"I just don't see the social good in using taxpayer money to fund a network that provides more television and bandwidth for illegally downloading files," he said. "We should spend money on getting people fit, rather than deteriorating their quality of life with higher bandwidth to surf the Net."
Story is here
To have always on internet without blocking up your phone line? /shrugs
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
BullShyht
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right. --Isaac Asimov
Actually:
Q: Are you interested in switching to broadband?
A: Well, I haven't really considered it before. I mean, the costs are high, but it seems to be the rage these days, so I'd really be in-NO CARRIER
There is no broadband or DSL available where I live. The telephone lines in my neighborhood are only good for 26.4 K (not 56 K). A telephone company employee told me that they have main lines that are trunked with 26.4 K allocated per phone line. I live in an older neighborhood slighty outside of a small city in the mountains of northern Arizona.
I get by surprisly well with 26.4 K. I modified the host file in both Linux and Windows to divert some of the advertising related URLs so that less advertisements appear. Web pages now load significantly faster. There is also no longer a delay while while waiting for a response from the advertising related URL.
I mostly just look at websites that discuss investing, Linux, ham radio and news. Downloading porn is not practical at 26.4 K so I do not do much of that. When I need installation CDs for Linux or something I have them sent by mail instead of spending several days downloading the image files. I get by just fine and do not mind not having a high-speed connection. It's not like I have a choice anyway.
The last time I used dilaup was in 1994, just before leaving for college. Since then, I've had megabit-level internet access continuously since. I've just moved out of Seattle to look for work in LA. I'm staying at my grandmother's (rather nice) place just south of LA where she connects via dialup.
First attempt was cable modem. The cable company wanted to wait three weeks before they could drop the modem off. In order to pick up the modem, the account holder needs to be present. Problem is, the account holder is my deceased grandfather (grandma doesn't want utility accounts in her name, as she is worried the spammers will know she is a widow and untold horrors will follow).
So, I called up a quality DSL provider and ordered the best service they could guarantee for the line -- 1.5m down / 256k up. The DSL gear arrived in a few days, and service followed a few days later. The modem synced at 384k down / 128k up. The ISP's bandwidth tester measured 200k down and 22k up. Even better, the connection is highly intermittant, much of the time a ping to the ISP-side router results in 65 % packet loss! Actual service is ocasionally 2-3x dialup speed, but mostly intermittant. Grandma can't understand why her emails take hours to send (because the mail server can't be contacted...).
I've arranged for the DSL people to contact the incumbant teleco and work on the line. This may happen in the next few days.
At the same time, I'm in touch with the cable modem ppl who claim they can get a modem and install dude out in two or three days. Would be nice if they can accomplish this, but I'm not hopeful.
As an experienced IT guy who has made fiber and DS3 cross connects, planned redundant router installations for small colos, and developed large portions of major software packages, I find this process very frustrating. For grandma, the difficulty is a thousand miles over her head.
Grandma is eager to get back to dialup (which I've done, until the teleco or the cable ppl can give us a decent connection). I'm back to alternating between Starbucks WiFi, and bluetooth+GPRS.
Even better -- Grandma's house is right on the beach in a rather high-rent neighborhood. The houses are huge, so the density of customers per square mile is low, and the distance to the CO is high.
2003:
10,000 people surveyed (note: I'm making up numbers to make a point)
4,000 currently on dialup
2,400 don't care to switch to broadband
2004:
10,000 people surveyed
1,000 currently on dialup
600 don't care to switch
"Last year, 60%, this year 60%" doesn't mean much without know whether a lot of the people who didn't care to switch a year ago have already switched.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
Bitch, bitch, bitch. Until a few months ago, my home setup was: 3 simultaneous users sharing a 56k modem via NAT. Actually, unless somebody was downloading serious porn/mp3s/movies (made convenient by VNC running on the NAT machine/leechbox), the impact of multiple users was pretty much negligible. (If you disbelieve, pay more careful attention to the blinkenlights of your modem, and see just how much of the time it spends sitting idle. Of course, the Proxomitron Effect could have something to do with this.) For the unattended 'heavy leeching', the modem connected at midnight and disconnected at 6am.
Incidentally, there is some claiming being done that you can't download full-length movies over dialup. You most certainly can, the only difference is you watch them "next week", not "tonight". (Assuming you don't want to tie up your phone line all day long.)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Actually informative / interesting ? I have been wondering why they don't ? P2P, DSL, T1, TCP, Internet2, what ever - they are technologies so how they can blame one but not others ?? They all are enablers, enabling communication. They actually should ban all the communications if they want to ban one - maybe we are not allowed to speak or to write next, we may transfer something they own..
My parents wouldn't even use the internet if it wasn't always there. The hassle of dialing up was enough of a barrier to keep them from going online. I had a computer for years, my parents tried it once in a while but never really used it. Then after having DSL in my room for a few years I setup a computer upstairs for them. It was there for a good 6 months before they started to use it. But now they are on the net all the time. Checking the weather, watching my spending on my joint collage account, reserving plane tickets, etc... They don't use email much, mom gets enough at work and dad hasn't even got an account. They never would of gotten into it if they had to dial up.
Most people don't want broadband because they don't really use the net with their dialup, just email. They have used that web thing once in a while, but its just a toy or an addon to email for them.
If someone asked me how to get on the internet these days. Dial up would be the last thing I tell them.
It isn't a speed thing at all, its all about being always connected without tieing up the phone. Speed is only something us geeks really care about.
The internet just isn't the internet without broadband.
God, root, what is the difference?
My grandparents can get 10Mbps down/1Mbps up cable service from Optimum Online, which is much better than my 3Mb/256Kb line I have at home, but they have 56K. It costs them around nothing a month through access4free, and they're perfectly happy with the speed. They don't have to deal with ads on their service, either, since they just establish a PPP connection on their eMac and use Apple's Mail.app to get their Hotmail email. Couldn't be better for them, honestly.
here, dialup is insanely expensive(~80$ a month if you consider cost of a phone line). alternatively, you can get 8.95$/month(wich works out to about 6$/month US) cable-lite-lite which is basically a 112k/s(?) cable box with dhcp/dynamic ip allocation. you do NOT have to subscribe to even basic cable to get it, either.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I presently rent a flat in Melbourne, Australia. I use dialup rather than broadband because it's far less hassle to get connected.
Dialup: One only need a phone line. Flats already have phone lines. If for some reason you actually need to get a new physical phone line installed you only need to contact the phone company. There are no extra connection costs to get online, just join the ISP.
Broadband: Many flats don't have cables installed. To get a cable installed, you need to contact not just the cable company, but you also need to get permission from the body corporate that administers the flat in which one lives. Getting permission from the body corporate can be about as pleasant as having teeth pulled, and usually takes a lot longer. When the cable is installed, there's also the cost of laying that cable and the cost of getting the broadband modem installed. Renting the cable is also an additional cost to the phone line, unless one purchases a package deal of some sort.
In short, broadband is a lot more hassle than dialup. Dialup may be a lot slower, but it is also cheaper. My 33K modem has served me well for six years now and I have no plans to retire it.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
If the majority of users were presented with dialup (max download 5KB/s) or broadband (max download 32KB/s) for $5 more a month, I guarantee they'd choose broadband.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The first thing I do when I launch Opera is go to the default folder and "Launch All Pages In This Folder". It loads the 10 sites I use every day all at once. On dialup it would choke if I tried to do that.
When I had dialup I was always trying to load pages in the background while I read another page so that I didn't have to wait. I've always run proxy filters, and when I had dialup I would surf with images off a lot more than I do now.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Well, you might be able to get a second phone line for less.
There are still a lot of people in the developed world who are not prepared to give up their life, and money, to the internet. Many people still find they dont need the internet to enjoy themselves. It may be everywhere, but for those who do not know how to use computers/internet or only use them to browse occasionally, for work, or to check e-mails occasionally, its a hassle they would rather do without.
I'd rather go to federal prison and become the girlfriend to some guy named Tiny before I ever give up my broadband!!
Satisfied with the World Wide Wait, until that 57.6Kbps line chokes on even a single 128Kbps audio stream. When these streams are as ubiquitous as Websites, and more (because they're mobile, and audio doesn't distract like a page), the app will generate the demand to pull people to broadband.
--
make install -not war
Given a lack of experience, ppl tend to choose the devil they know.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
As someone who made the transition back to dial-up due to economic reasons (bad economy). There was only two good things about broadband. One the downloading of .ISO's and keeping my systems updated. The other was streaming music. other than that, the Internet really wasn't worth the $50+ I paid for it. Before that I had dial-up when dial-up became affordable, and though the blocked lines thing was sometimes annoying to other people, if people really wanted to get in touch, the operator can always break the connection. Now we have an upgrade to the modems that allows you to place your Internet on hold, and answer the call. So if the economy ever does better I will go with DSL instead of cable because I can do servers. Else I'll live with my upgraded modem and dial-up.
I live outside the cities around me, on a farm in the country. As much as I would love to have broadband access, none is available to me (save satellite...) Also, the area I live in has poor phone lines, so I can't even get 56K rates! I assume that there will be people such as myself for the forseeable future... cable/dsl is just not available outside cites, and there is a sizeable portion of the US that does not live in/close enough to a city.
did the survey ask them if they had broadband access at work?
i do.. i use cheap-as-shit dialup at home for email and some minimal surfing, and broadband at work for grabbing iso's and other bandwidth-intensive stuff.
These people obviously haven't used broadband before.
Derek Greene
Surprising - thought it would be a lower number.
... "Most people" are struggling to pay their IMPORTANT bills, like the hydro and the gas and the phone and the mortgage/rent, and can't pay whatever gouging fee it costs to get high-speed internet. "Most people" do not consider seeing the latest "Strongbad E-mail" and playing Unreal Tournament to be essentials of life.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Some users of dial-up sheepishly acknowledge that they avoid admitting their low network speeds when they are with their better-connected friends.
Hell no. I revel in telling my better-connected friends how elite I am because I'm willing to wait a whole 24 hours while my Slackware ISO pumps through my itty bitty link. Not only that, but I routinely smash low pingers in a certain FPS to the point where I'm one of the best on the planet in the game -- and that's all through my analog baby.
- IP
I'm still using a dial-up. I signed up for DSL about two years ago and received a call from EarthLink saying that it was not available in my area. "Huh? I checked my number on your webpage and it said that it *was* available!" "Sorry sir, that lookup isn't always accurate." "Damn." So, what to do now? I've been with EarthLink for almost six years now; changing my e-mail address now is a horror that I don't want to deal with. I feel like I'm "forced" to be satisfied w/ dial-up.
According to the article's own statistics, broadband can cost from 2-5 times more a month unless you're upgrading from the most expensive dial-up to the cheapest broadband. That's not counting the cost of a cable modem. Even taking their slimmest example of "only $8 more a month" adds up to $108 over the first year of use. I'm willing to pay that extra cash (split four ways amongst roommies with bundled cable and a house LAN). But why should someone who DOESN'T need the bandwidth (being happy to do something else while waiting counts as not needing it) have to pay for it anyway to avoid being branded as a luddite who can't set the clock on their VCR (article's terms, not mine)?
I need a sig.
I disagree with his can't easily share dialup. I am presently using a 3COM LAN modem with a caching web and DNS on the internal LAN. Also I've had broadband for a year, and am back on dialup. One of the nice things is that my websites are swelt instead of fat (just look at what fast machines on developers desks has done to program size).
... That most people don't know what they're missing, and therefore why would they want to upgrade?
What do you know, mister!
No one on slashdot, not a poster or a lurker reading, has ever had sex.
I think this is the biggest issue, and here's where the ISPs are shooting themselves in the feet: by stunting their connections, limiting upstream bandwidth, blocking ports, and otherwise placing restrictions on what their users can do with their connections (essentially viewing the Internet as the web and email and nothing more), the ISPs are preventing more interesting uses for those broadband connections from being developed.
If everyone had a T1 class or better connection to his or her home, interesting new uses for such connections would pop up, thereby spurring demand for more bandwidth and increasing the value of that bandwidth. If all you get is web pages that load a few milliseconds faster, a lot of people will find that's not a compelling reason to spend more money.
[Subtext: for those who already want high-speed access, get it from a carrier that doesn't do these things, such as Speakeasy! That's the only way the situation will change. You vote with your dollars, whether you intend to or not. (I have no affiliation with Speakeasy, other than as a happy customer who got sick of dealing with the blunders of cable companies (yes, I went through several).)]
Just wait till SVG hit's the big time.
If ISP of broadband internet connection does not have or support newsgroup(news server), then not so many people would sign up for the BICS(Broadband Internet Connection Service).
For the longest time, I couldn't justify the extra expense of broadband. What pushed me over the edge was the realization that we needed the extra speed to download all the Windows patches. (To be fair, also the Linux patches.)
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Have you tried getting a second phone line and doing channel bonding?
Cheaper way: go all cellphone plus cable. We used to have a landline plus Sprint DSL, but when we moved, we switched to cell phones, and got Earthlink cable, which was four times faster both directions, and $5/month cheaper (not to mention, no phone line made it a LOT cheaper).
and he's fine sticking with his pokey ass 53k
I don't know why people insist on calling it 56k service when there is no such thing.
Anyway, most older folks don't seem to care about slow ass 53k connections, they just go take a dump or make a cup of coffee while they download pics of the kids and today's trojans and viruses with OE....
Zzzzzzzzzzzz.......... Not for me. Sorry...
I want FIBER damn it!!
...They get their pr0n elsewhere.
shyeah right, happy with dial-up. next they'll be telling us the ipod mini was a roaring success.
Here in Australia, no matter which broadband ISP you go with, you need to pay our resident telco monopoly (Telstra) AUD$139 for the "privilege" of enabling broadband on that phone line. This make the economics of a free trial untenable unless you can convince a significant proportion of trial users to become full time broadband subscribers.
I'd love to see a few ISPs offer a free trial, but I fear that the ones who will are the biggest players, who offer the worst possible contracts compared to the real value ISPs. Not to mention that Telstra is able to defray the cost of enabling broadband 100% giving it an unfair competitive advantage (a subject for another post and the ACCC).
Another cost would be that of the modem itself.
Visceral Psyche Films
Sure, I only get wireless in one or two rooms (considering setting up some sort of 'relay' to expand the coverage ... pointers anyone?), but my wife can use the dial-up (which keeps her happy) on one laptop while I surf at high(er)-speed on my work laptop.
Plus since it's an iBook and TiBook, I can do the donwloads on the Ti, set it to target mode (via firewire) and transfer the downloaded files to the iBook.
It's the only solution I can live with ... we had DSL in MN before moving to the DC area. DSL hasn't made it to our pocket (well ... reasonable DSL hasn't) and the Cable service is a gouge if you don't get cable already (which we don't).
... And we all live happily ever after.
(This was posted via dial-up ... can ya tell?)
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
"PLUS, you can't get broadband month-to-month..."
Wrong. In California at least, SBC requires a one-year contract for DSL. Comcast and Adelphia (cable) are happy to give you broadband month-to-month.
if you use the net enough to need a second phone line. Once you buy that 2nd line, you're better off with broadband. The cost is the same and it's faster and better (stays up, no redial).
$20/mo (nominal, maybe $15) for decent dial-up, plus $25/mo for the 2nd line (that's the CHEAPEST you can get a line, in MI, including taxes etc). Most places have basic cable broadband for $40 if not less.
Before we got broadband, all 3 machines in our house were sharing a 28.8K modem (too far from the switch for 56K to work). Now THAT is pain. Sometimes 2 or 3 minutes for a web pages with some graphics and no animation to load.
Dial-up works great for reading email and web surfing which is the majority of what I do with the internet on my box at home.
Every few months when I want a lot of software I take a friend out to a nice lunch in exchange for mooching of their high speed connection. We both have fun, get a good expensive meal and I still save a ton of money.
Same for music. I live in an urban area with a good selection of used CD stores. For what I save off a high speed connection I can buy a hefty amount of CDs at these places.
Some plans have nice rates.......for a year at a time....then they jack it up.
Duh, I have a sense of the future.
I probably will not get a high speed connection until it gets under $40 a month.
Steve
I think dial-up is perfectly fine for most people. I also like the way it is set up. If I really wanted to, I could set up my own dial-up ISP (er.. also if I knew how). I couldn't set up my own cable network or high-speed phone line access. With dial-up it's difficult to form a monopoly. There are lots of dial-up ISPs in my town, but there is only one cable provider (the cable company), and one high-speed provider (the phone company). No competition, and no way that competition could even be created without making up some crazy line leasing rules (those in Ontario know how well that's worked out for our power system so far).
In the abstract, I agree with you. But in reality for most people, the choice is dial-up or cable. DSL isn't possible for most people, and until wireless high-speed internet works reliabily and cheaply, we really have no options.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Didn't try very hard, did you? :)
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
You have to be dialed up to get incoming calls, but that's not too bad.
If it was only 5$ more a month, maybe they would, but in Toronto, Ontario, it's more than $20.00 more per month for high-speed. There's tons of options for dial-up but only two for high-speed (cable and high-speed phone).
NetZero $9.95/month 56/56
Rogers Cable $44.95/month* 3000/384
Rogers Cable Lite $29.95/month* 128/64
*Without Rogers Cable TV package add an extra $10.00 for regular and $5.00 for lite.
Bell Sympatico High-Speed Ultra $54.95/month 4000/800
Bell Sympatico High-Speed $44.95/month 3000/800
Bell Sympatico DSL Basic $29.95/month 128/64 (2 GB transfers max)
Rogers even charges $24.99 for an ISA network card. >:[
I would have been more than perfectly happy with my 56K dialup. If I only had one phone line, and it meant my wife couldn't yak with the inlaws all the time. Unfortunately, before there was DSL in this neighborhood, she insisted that we maintain a second line so she could yak yak while I was online. And then when DSL became available it was only slightly more expensive than having a dialup account and the second phone line.
Really, I like having the faster DSL connection. Though buying a copy of Mandrake 10 on eBay last week (it arrived a day before the message from the eBay admins telling me that the seller had been booted from eBay for selling copies of the Mandrake CD set for four bucks. Go Mandrake! bust 'pirates' or whatever!) meant I didn't need broadband for that.
resigned
I've made broadband affordable by sharing the connection with my neighbor. We split the cost of a WAP and he bought a WNIC. Instead of shelling out $50 a month, I now pay $25 to be connected all the time and to have a reasonably thick pipe.
You cannot do anything on the net with 56K!!!!
I say that survey is a load of bulls**t! Surveys like that stop the world from developing because it makes governments think "oh... do we really need broadband?" And then what happens??? Corporations will exploit broadband as it is the fastest thing around and will charge top dollar! Brilliant. Broadband should be the standard worldwide!!!!
Probably that 60% didn't know the difference between broadband and 56K back then. Dumb w*nkers!
I am dying here with 56K. It takes forever for me to download source code, updates, etc, etc.
I have been dying to get cable for over 5 years!!!! I cannot even get ADSL!!! I really cannot wait till I finish uni! I'll get a job and buy a block of land that has CABLE!!!!!! Screw the telephone line.
Plus I'm a hard core gamer and I get owned whenever I play against people with cable. Lag galore!!!!
Btw, Japan and Korea have broadband everywhere!!!! they are major developers of some the greatest games! I cannot even play them because my connection is too laggy and slow!
All my research is real time based! Pretty useless on a laggy connection.
What about all those people who do remote admin stuff.. Pretty useless on 56k
And by the way, fast web pages would be really nice considering a lot of the websites I visit are becoming more and more flash oriented. Some have 2mb intros. What are you meant to do? Wait for about 3 minutes for the first page to load....
If anyone disagrees with what I just said, you are a loser. Wake up! Any improvement for the world is good! Don't be so conservative. And if you are so conservative, why the hell are you turning on your computer?? Go back to your typewriters and snail mail you conservative freaks! or even still how about feather quills and homing pigeons...
I'm on dialup and I've downloaded 600+ mb files before... on P2P networks even, without the benefit of an uninterupted download. So obviously, 50-60 mb files aren't a big deal... again, it just means I have to remember to start the download before I go to bed or go out. And the phone lines running to my house suck... my connection is slow even for dialup, but I manage. It does mean you have to change the way you manage your downloads, and certain uses for the Internet are out of the question on dialup... but for some people, that just isn't a big deal.
And though it's true that a lot of people are ignorant about service packs and the like, and put their system security at risk, I'm not sure your typical broadband user is that much more savvy. By and large it's better for a person ignorant about PC security to be on and off with dialup rather than using an always-on shared network to access the Internet.
The only BB I have available to me at home is satellite and I ain't dealing with the latency.
So, I use the T3 and my laptop at work when I need to get a big file to my home computer.
Its a hassle, and I'd get DSL if I could, but, I can't because there's no service in the sticks.
Over the year 2003, many of the 40% of unhappy user would switch to broadband, so the 60% of happy user in 2004, is in fact a much smaller percentage, after substracting hte users switched to broadband
sometimes the improvement isn't worth moving the cruft. hell, i make a decision like that every once in a while, and i'm 27.
that's why my computer can still dual boot.
brain rot is one thing, and it's real, but in some cases you just don't see how unimportant the improvement you're offering is - you're trying to solve a problem, they're trying to quit talking about it because they don't actually care.
rofl, Speakeasy... are you kidding? After looking through their pricing: 1.5 Mbps Down / 256 Kbps Up Broadband Connection @ $60!? No thanks, I get that same down/up speeds from SBC Yahoo for HALF the price.
My grandma didn't understand why her children and grandchildren were telling her she needed to switch to broadband from dialup. "we have two phone lines, so it doesn't stop people from calling us" "but I don't need anything faster!" Um. Right.... So, we convinced her to switch (it's really not that expensive and it meant she could get rid of a phone line), and now she wouldn't go back. The main reason is because of the games she plays online, but she also has to download decent-sized attachments as well as virus updates and windows updates. Really, the users just don't know what they're missing. If they knew, they'd switch (assuming they could afford it).
Most families have more than one person living under the roof. There are currently four people living with me and a total of four desktop computers and two laptops for college. That means at any given time there are 0-4 people sharing the Internet at any given time. One shared connection at $40/month sure beats at least two AOL connections at $25/month each.
If people are resistant to change then most likely they're not technically savy enough to know the difference. The inability to run large security updates via dialup makes dialup connections a big target for worms and viruses. I hear a lot of "I only sign on for a few minutes every day or two" so I'm not exposed like people on broadband are is a huge myth that needs to be dispelled.
Enough rambling. One can be resistant to change, but ignorance isn't a proper reason in my book.
If you can get by with a text browser then dialup is fine. I made do from '01-'03. In fact, your webrowsing will actually be quicker and more efficient than using a typical browser with broadband.
Not good for software retrieval, more than adequate for information retrieval.
I did the same thing, except I had Qwest/MSN DSL. Now I have a cellphone and Cox cable.
The other big advantage to this is that I no longer have to deal with the incompetent fools at Qwest or MSN. The service from those two companies is unbelievably bad. A friend of mine moved into an apartment that Cox said they couldn't provide cable modem service to, and, against my strong advice, signed up for Qwest/MSN DSL. It took them a whole month to get it working.
Do a little math: 60% of last years dial up users diddn't want to switch, but many people did, so 60% of the remaining users is less. Some people just take longer to appreciate the blessings of DSL.
Well at least you get 56k, the dial up connections in my neighborhood in this part of Arizona are only 26.4k. I can't even get 28.8 or 56k. The telephone company said "26.4k is plenty good." I then asked how much DSL would cost and was told "oh, DSL is not available where you live."
A telephone company repairmen later told me that he had hooked his laptop up at the main junction box for the whole neighborhood and he could only get 26.4k. He did not have any idea if or when the local phone lines would be upgraded. Cable is not available where I live either.
Actually, I am not complaining very much. I am not a gamer so I get by ok with with 26.4k. I do not download many large porn files much or MP3s either. The Slashdot webpage is quite useable at that speed. I mostly just look at websites and forums related to Linux, investing, ham radio and my other hobbies. They do ok at this speed. When I download something large I start the download before going to bed and it is frequently done by the time I wake up in the morning. Downloading the latest Linux installation CDs would take several days so I always pay a few dollars to have them mailed to me. When I ordered the Slackware 9.1 installation CDs they arrived by snailmail in only two days which is faster that I could have downloaded them. If broadband or DSL ever becomes available I am not sure if I would want to pay for it.
About a year ago I installed Windows 2K and let it run all night downloading the approximately 100 MB of critial security patches. Of course during the hours that I was downloading it was still unpatched and vulnerable so when morning arrived I discovered that a worm had found its way in. Oh well!
I have taken some courses at a local community college where the computer on my desk had a high speed connection. That was nice but the websites I visit are good enough at 26.4k. I would be totally happy if 56k ever became available. Well actually, by the time that happens websites will probably be so bloated with graphics and animation that I will need something better. Several of my nearby friends in town have slow connections and for some reason are unable to email me files with attachements that are more than a few hundred kilobites in size. At least I can do that without any problem!
I think most of it comes down to cost or what people think the cost is vs the actual availabilty of the item. For the people who cant get dsl/cable we can leave them out of the equation for this part.
/. paying 50$ for 256/128 i wouldnt upgrade from dial up for that
Cheap dial up 9.95
Highspeed dialup 14.95 (we all know its only better compression)
cable / dsl $34-50, however this comes at many speeds. I see people on
But I have NO problem paying 40$ for 3000/384 (bellsouth extreme dsl)
As for the people in rural areas im sure many of them would love to get some form of quicker access to the internet.
Gamers probably have more desire to be on high speed than non gamers. Does mom really need to download her latest chicken recipe any faster or does her son / daughter want to pop tank round into the competition in ut'04
In some cases you get what you pay for and it is worth the cost. But some people dont need broadband, just like most people dont need a $500 graphics card.
Karma's over rated. Speak your mind.
Having Broadband isnt just about the speed, though it certainly is nice. My family hardly ever used to the internet before we had it (600/128 Cable) installed, because they couldnt be bothered to wait for the modem to dial and then sit around waiting for the page to load. Now there is a machine on 24/7 hooked straight in, and if they just want to check email or whatever it takes about 30 seconds.
I cant stand dialup now i've switched. I had a grand Modem destroying ceremony. Never looked back. Chances are most people who make the switch won't either.
I had a really great ISP that had shell accounts on unix machines with all the usual GNU tools, so I'd write scripts to handle whatever tasks that required a constant connection. I had scripts that would even buy stuff without any user interaction. It's a good way to learn to test your code a lot before putting it into production.
So it's not at all suprising that people can do without broadband. If a heavy user like myself could get by just about anybody could.
Well, I live in France and here, you get to pay for the phone communications while you're on dial-up. DSL access is mainly a way to get unlimited internet time for a given amount of money. We do have "broadband" offers (well, they call it this way) as low as 128Kb/s... :)
Plus, it is a way to still be available by the phone while you're on the internet.
So I guess the statistical could be rather different here... I'm wondering.
no i do not have kids, or a debt free lifestyle you insensitive clod.
Or a life for that matter.
Robort knows all.
I thought of that as well, but in Canada (with taxes and all) a second line will cost ~$25-30. Paying a $20 premium in price over something that, in reality (save for people who perhaps have home offices w/ fax machines, but even then they're in the same boat - can't receive faxes while on the net) offers no real benefeit. In actuality, the high-speed connection would likely be more helpful to the home office.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
I clean up/rebuild [1] a lot of old PCs for people, and if the box doesn't have a network card so I can plug it into my LAN/DSL router, I buy one or borrow one out of another machine. It's just not practical otherwise. A workaround for dial-up users might be for MS to issue frequent Service Packs as freely as AOL CDs, but somehow I don't expect that in the foreseeable future.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I wonder how they make this survey. They really didn't say anything about numbers involved in these surveys, so I can't believe it. Can you?
8.95 a month - including acceleration that ready works (Access4less.net)
over 2 gigabytes download in a one month that I was totally obsessed
Reliblity, always there, always works.
Filled up my 60 gig drive and many, many CD-R's.
And I have yet to see any boardband connection that will give me full frame, crisp video at 800x600 or better rez. No needs it!
Their lawns are not 8" tall all the time, the cars are always clean and they seem to keep a more tidy abode. Coincidence? Hmm...
Um, No! They get stuff done while waiting for the MP3 or ISO to finish downloading. The broadband guys just find another bright shiny thing (tm) to keep them from their chores and family. They also have an extra ~$360/year for gas for the mower and wax for the car.
The truth shall set you free!
On the assumption that at least some of the existing dialup users made the switch, there are now less modemmers than in 2003. 60% of that smaller number means there are less people who aren't interested.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics...
The key thing you forget to mention is that the cable companies PAID FOR their own networks. Hence I think they have every right to monopolize them.
I have shopped around for DSL. That was why I ended up on Mindspring way back when. Bellsouth is required to resell their services but there isn't much in rate control.
The biggest problem switching is losing the e-mail address.. but I am getting closer to not caring
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
...on what you use it for. multimedia stuff has to be d/led rather than played via stream, but having just come from a 56k dialup, I didn't think it was bad. just happened to stumble onto a better deal on a 128k 'broadband' connection, same price and noticeably faster, so there I am.
It's not increasingly useless, its that companies are ignoring it, thinking it unnecessary.
But this is causing problems.
I know at least two people who still use dial-up, and don't need anything faster. Trying to support one of them is tricky, as stuff like Windows update just doesn't have a viable option for dial-up. But you shouldn't have to go broadband simply to clear up errors in the software.
The other is my parents. They don't use the internet enough to justify either the cost of broadband for their part of the house, or for wiring up Cat5 up to my rooms (or getting WiFi).
Yep, dial-up for them is actually mroe cost-effective than getting wired into the already-existing broadband in the house. It's just lucky that I can easily bring it upstairs to keep it patched myself.
Far be it from me (a non-coder) to normally tell software people how they should do things, but isn't one of the first rules of Internet Content to never make assumptions about the end-user's systems? Hence they really need to provide an easy way of obtaining such updates on CD/DVD. Especially on things that MS flag up as "critical".
TiggsTiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
For me the main advantages are not:
:D I borrow and use removable media.
- bandwidth
But:
- not trying up the phone line
- being on all the time
Those are the main selling points imho, and with the addition of slower services (>256k down) ISPs seem to agree.
By the way, I don't have broadband or dial up
A blog I run for the wealth
who needs broadband when all you do is check email and make some purchases?
I have read 3 redcurring themes in the comments to this article:
1. People who are happy with dialup are ignorant
of what broadband has to offer
2. People who are happy with dialup are not IT
people, are not technically savy, or have
anonomalous natures for these groups.
3. People who are happy with dialup have never
used broadband.
Okay.
1. I have been a programmer for 5 years
2. I do a lot of coding at home, but use dialup
3. During the workweek I have daily access to a
T-1 line and I do not have any strong cravings
for anything other then dialup at home.
I challenge anyone to tell me what I am missing out on by having dialup at home.
- email and web browsing is fast enough for me on
my line. Pictures load just fine. I have to
wait for flash animations, but I might want to
see one about once a month
- I only want very large items of software about
3 times a year. I take a friend with a
highspeed connection out to lunch at nice
restaurant in exchange for mooching. We both
have a good time, we both get a good meal, and
I end up saving over $200 - $300 a year.
- If I want cheap music I can go to one of the
many used CD places in my area. Its cheaper
then legal downloads at $1 a song. I still
save that $200 - $300 a year....which can buy
many used CDs.
Is there anything I haven't covered that I would need a highspeed connection for?
Steve
Heathens.
I would be extremely curious to go back and survey those original 60% and see how many of them *did* in fact switch over, regardless of their interest a few months before.
Asking people stuff like that on a survey is pointless, since peoples minds change so fast.
If a few months later your kids are pestering you non-stop because "Jimmy's movies go faster than mine!", guess what money and daddy will do? And no, they're not going to call back the survey company and re-report their result :P
At home: USB port, DVD-reader. 56k modem for emergencies.
Funny, when I am at work, I work.
(except for reading Slashdot of course - but I could probably argue that keeping up with tech news is part of my job)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Where I live, we're just now getting the infrastructure put in for cable-based access. My chances of getting DSL are beyond slim-to-none, and sat.-based is too latency-rich.
Besides, it's only $16/month for a good dial-up account, and I have a laptop. When it's finally available later this year, it just means that I get to purchase more hardware and pay between $40 and $50 a month additionally for 'Net access.
When I need to download OS updates, laptop goes with me to work, or to Panera.
it may get lost in all the posts now but for what it is worth, here is my $0.02 Just like data expanding to fill the available hard drive space (remember when 80MB was impossibly huge??....well....I do at least) so will web sites expand to fill available bandwidth. If broadband were the only option available, web data will expand and we will be no better off than if 56kbps were the only option. Dialup is good....it keeps web site size down and the experience good for all.
If no one else had a phone, would you want one? The thing about broadband is that while it theoretically enables killer applications like Voip, video phones, personal webcams, etc, these aren't interesting until the people you care about also have broadband. The only way to get from here to there is to lower the price and increase the availability.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
But I now have 56K dial-up. I dropped cable TV and internet, because I was tired of paying to watch commercials, and really didn't use the bandwidth I had to the internet. Why pay $80 a month for TV and internet, when I can pay $10 for dial-up and use rabbit-ears (I get NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and UPN just fine) for TV?
The major reason I dropped all of my cable service was because I couldn't get SCI-FI unless I subscribed to digital cable. That pissed me off.
Broadband is nice, but like other people have said, dial-up is just fine for surfing around. Yes, I do updates to all of my boxes at home. In fact, my home network runs through my Linux machine running a caching name server, iptables firewall, and ppp on demand. I have a lot of automated processes to keep all of my machines current with patches and security updates (Windows and Linux), and they work just the same over dial-up as they did over broadband.
As far as waiting to connect, it only takes about 20 seconds or so for my modem to dial and connect. Big deal.
My dad says he's considered switching to Cable (the only broadband they have in my 1-horse home town), but he doesn't for 2 reasons:
1) A dial-up keeps his phoneline busy, and telemarketers are not likely to leave a message on CallWave
2) He does other things besides sit in front of his computer, so if he has to do critical updates or update his AV defs, he can set it to go and then walk away from the computer to do something else...
I figure most people his age (or older) think the same way if they even have a computer.
/nova20
I have a rotary phone that I've used within the past week (It's in my living room). It's great too, when I call up an automated phone service, and they say "press 1 for blah" I just use the rotary, and I get a real person immediately!
I dislike cellphones entirely. I got a bulky large one for HS graduation, and I used it maybe 3 or 4 times. It was one of those giant ones that would get really hot when you did talk on it. I'm not tied to my desk either, That's what the answering machine is for. If it's important, they'll leave a message, if it's not, then I don't have to worry. I hate it when I'm talking to someone, and am interrupted by the cellphone. If someone does that to me, that gives me permission to ignore them at will.
I also don't even own a television. I ordered cable just last week, but only for the internet connection (it was cheaper to get internet+tv+telephone than just internet alone, weird).
I don't feel the need for a new phone, I don't feel the need for a cell, and I don't feel the need to have a TV to watch all the shoddy programming. Maybe I'm the odd one out though.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
President of the United States himself announcing broadband access a priority
Well, monkey p0rn doesn't load fast on 56K, does it?
> Funny, when I am at work, I work.
I'm a "System/Network Engineer" for a telco, which despite the description is a largely reactive job.
Which means 50% of the time I poke around the net looking for stuff... usually docuementation and neater ways of solving problems.
The other 50% of the time I'm in a mad panic doing the jobs of three people while pumped full of coffee.
So it all balances out in the end.
Matt
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
When dialled-up, I felt pressure to sit at the computer and get all my on-line things done right away, so as not to waste the time the phone line was dialled up. Now I have broadband, I'm happy to wander away from the computer for any reason.
Xenu loves you!
"NetZero $9.95/month 56/56"
Obviously you haven't read NetZero's EULA....that thing is scary. It's worth having to pay $15/month for dial-up just to NOT have to agree with that.
If God had had a computer it would have taken him 7 months to create the earth...if he even bothered to do it at all.
I do all the things you just mentioned with our dialup (shared wirelessly, no less ; ) connection at home. If it takes me an extra 5 minutes more than it takes you, who cares? I don't.
**>>BELCH
The big difference is that microwaves became progressively cheaper over time. The one we bought in the 70's was around $500. When it finally died a couple years ago, a replacement was $200.
...and I have a T1 at work, something comparable at my local library, a 128mb USB key ($35 at Wal-Mart), and some blank CDs. Besides large porn video downloads, why would I want to spend $40 a month on broadband, exactly?
It seems everybody misses the point. For several years I had 64kbit broadband. Why would I call something only marginally faster than 56K "broadband"? Because of entirely different mode of access - the "always-on" connection. It changes the way you think about Internet, it is no longer something you do once a day to read e-mail and chat on AIM - it is now something you do when you need something from Internet. You no longer need to connect to the Net, you are connected all the time. This is also useful for family access, when there is more than one Internet user.
Right now I have 256kbit connection which is also much cheaper (60$/mon and unlimited traffic, unlike the old one). I like the ability to play UT2004, use P2P and download videos, demos, flash, etc., but this isn't the best part of broadband. The best part is being able to instantly look up everything you need on a miriad of sites as much in-depth as you need.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I have broadband at work, but not at home.
I keep my computers up to date, but I can just have them automatically update during the night.
The only time I wish I had broadband is when shopping on ITMS. It takes me 2 minutes to download a 30 second sound sample. But once I have my shopping cart filled, I just tell it to download, then play games on my PS2.
I have broadband at work, but since we're using WinNT, I don't get to run ITMS here. But if we ever upgrade, I'll just do all my browsing here (with headphones) and buy at home.
For me, it's just not worth even an extra $10 for broadband. I'm a patient person.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Everyone I want to talk to has a computer. If they want me, email me.
Everyone, that is, except my in-laws.
Since my wife's deaf, I'm the one who has to talk to them when they call. But since my wife'd deaf, she's always online. And no, we don't need a second line.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
My wife and I just moving into a new house in the boonies.
It's been about a month now, and our microwave is still in the utility room. We don't really have a use for it.
Oh yeah, and I don't have a cell, I don't want to talk to people. I don't have a TIVO, since I don't even get any channels where I and and don't want to pay for satalite. And yeah, I AM on dialup, since I don't play online games and I do my web development locally.
I lead the simple country life of a computer hacker.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
Where? My library got dialup
Some of these users simply don't comprehend the fact that they can email AND browse at the same time - it sounds simple but they don't understand it.
I'll never forget the moment my jaw dropped when I discovered TCP/IP I could chat and icq and ftp my "warez" (I was 17) all at the same time - I was flabberghasted.
I was impressed with TCP beyond all comprehension - it defied logic to me.
Some of these people are still living in the mindset of one task at a time - email, then web or NAV updates then web etc.