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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."
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.
I'm one of them.
We have 100Mb throughout the work organization, with a link to Internet2. I've got a DSL connection to a remote system for work. Yes, I think I've experienced broadband.
I almost never surf at home. When I do, I sometimes think "I ought to get broadband", but when it comes down to doing it, it's not a high priority. Because it is slow, I never enable images or scripts, which means I never get popups or annoying ads.
I does email and sends a bit of data out to be posted on a website. Most of that is automatic. I have more media (music, radio, and TV) than I can watch and listen to already, I don't need to download more. I gets distros on DVD or CD, either from work or in Linux Format.
Why do I need broadband at home?
As an aside, I actually did "get" broadband, for a day. I experienced the Qwest "Spirit of service Inaction". The qwest sales team lied to me and told me that static IP was included in the price they had quoted me. When it came time to deliver, they wanted $15/month more. That was after they installed the service on the wrong line, and then said it would take another week to get it right. They lied to the state public service commission when I complained, so I never got any action taken against them for the fraud they committed.
So, why do I need broadband?
1) It's "percentage of dialup users interested to switch to broadband", not "percentage of internet users using dialup"
2) In this case the absolute number of dialup users CAN decrease, yet the percentage of users remaining on dialup, who don't want to switch to broadband, can stay the same.
There's nothing wrong with the original poster's point.
-- All views expressed in this post are mine and do not
-- reflect those of my employer or their clients
also when it's impossible to keep your machine up-to-date with dialup nowadays anyways.
please also notice that in europe(at least around here) there is NO free local calls.
broadband gets cheaper quite fucking fast when it costs even 1-2 cent per minute. considering when I lived back at still at my parents it was not unusual to get a (what amounts to)200-300$ phone bill.
so for a even modest 'power user' getting broadband is a cost issue rather than just plain speed issue around here..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
One of the peculiarities of US phone service left over from the old AT&T monopoly is that all but the cheapest of residential plans allow free unlimited local calling. You can get straight metered service to save a few bucks if you never make any outgoing calls, but usually only the forgotten elderly do that. Back in the old Ma Bell days, local service was pretty well subsidized by expensive long distance rates. Perhaps it was to encourage residential phones so businesses would have someone to telemarket to...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I had a similar experience. I moved from Tacoma WA (where there are multiple broadband options) to a place called Brush Prairie (hard to get more small town than that). My internet connection is through smoke signals (Qwest has promised the tin cans and twine upgrade sometime next year). No DSL. No cable. And my dial up is screaming when I manage to get 28.8 speeds (forget 56K stuff). It was really painful.
However, I've got 6 acres to mess around on with my wife and dogs. I periodically think about getting a dish (for TV not internet) but always put it off until the next winter (I couldn't justify the cost during the spring and summer when I'm out in the yard all the time). The one thing I truly miss is decent online gaming. However, based on my prior useage in Tacoma, I suspect that having awesome online gaming access would create some problems at home (it is too addictive).
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."
1) I have high-speed at work for anything serious.
2) When at home, I really don't want to spend time on the Internet. I get to read, garden a little, talk to my wife, generally behave like a non-geek.
3) When I had high-speed internet, I would always be on. It's addicting.
I use similar logic for no longer having cable TV. However, I felt cable TV was something that draws you in and demands a strong time commitment. Broadband, on the other hand, makes it easier to download software, upload 4 megapixel photos to Ofoto.com for printing (try that over dial up- ye gads!), or a host of other things that an IT geek might do at home when he's just being a normal person yet not totally glued to the PC. If you are a geek at home too, there is a host of other reasons. But, if you can live without it, more power to you! And enjoy the looks on peoples faces when you tell them. It is the same look I get when they realize I get 3 channels on my TV.
Exactly..
Given 100 users surveyed, we might assume that the 40% who were interested made the switch between the survey in 2003 and 2004. That leaves 60 users for the survey in 2004
60% of 60 users is 36 users so in reality, only 36% of the original population has not switched and is still not interested.
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
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.
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.
Uhhh... you do realize that rotary phones are all pulse dial type and will screw with your DSL, don't you?
Even picking that phone up will cause problems on DSL. Dialing it can damage your DSL modem, since a "pulse" is just a quick short in the line.
I was quite annoyed when I had to track down a new DSL modem at Best Buy because the freaking ancient phone on the kitchen counter was dialed while I was online. And don't tease about Best Buy, either, 'cause that's where the SBC guys told me to go. It was either $75 to Best Buy or $200 to SBC for a new modem. Bastards.
Can you tell I'm bitter?
Here in Australia, no matter which broadband ISP you go with, you need to pay our resident telco monopoly (Telstra) AUD$139 for the "privilege" of enabling broadband on that phone line. This make the economics of a free trial untenable unless you can convince a significant proportion of trial users to become full time broadband subscribers.
I'd love to see a few ISPs offer a free trial, but I fear that the ones who will are the biggest players, who offer the worst possible contracts compared to the real value ISPs. Not to mention that Telstra is able to defray the cost of enabling broadband 100% giving it an unfair competitive advantage (a subject for another post and the ACCC).
Another cost would be that of the modem itself.
Visceral Psyche Films
If it was only 5$ 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 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.