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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."
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
...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...'
Out of those 60% how many have actually used high speed and know what a difference it makes?
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.
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.
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.)
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
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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?
.. 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?
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.
IMHO it is pretty simple actually. Average, email- and browser-using people don't want to spend an extra $10 / month for what they consider to be a hassle to setup. People fear change, and judging by my work with people who have obtained broadband connections with one company but are still paying AOL $10 / month for basically an email address, they might have a point. There are people out there that want to take advantage of their ignorance.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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.
>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.Many users do nothing more than look at a few pages and send/receive email.
That is about all my parents ever do. The kicker is the attachments that they send and recieve. Do you know how long it takes to recieve 60megs of pictures? They have people they know sending them theses pictures (they need them for newsletters) who don't notice the size due to broadband. First time we find out about it is:
Ok, its at 2% and 15 minutes have gone by, what the #@%$ are we getting this time.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
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.
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.
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
:(
A good point, but with one flaw I think. If the new ISP sends an email to the sender each time a piece of mail is forwarded from the old domain, what about spam? For each piece of spam mail, you would get twice the email volume. Not to mention that the spammers databases would see the reply and know that the email addy is valid
Segfault
For argument's sake lets assume that the other 40% switched to Broadband after they were surveyed in 2003. Now if 60% of the remaining people have no interest in switching a year later then we have an increase in broadband interest.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
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
You do have to know how they work in order to program them correctly.
I don't know. I use to think like that, but with all the increased layers of abstraction, if this guy knows how databases and Java works, then how will knowing how the computer works help him?
Knowing the low levels of how the computer works won't help him write more efficient code like it would in C. For that all he needs to know are the O(x) of his algorithms and database calls. Nor will it help him with security, since you can't muck around with pointers directly in java. For that you just need to have an understanding of network security, and how to write good java code.
Most Slashdotters don't really give a shit. :-)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
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.
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.
Strangely enough, I find these two sentences to be contradictory.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
er... ...?
you assume that everyone who was interested before, actually switched ?
and that the dialup subscriber base never grew
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
How often do you need that? Is it worth the extra money to you? If so, then great. But in my case, it was cheaper to buy a USB memory fob and just download what I need at work or at the library. Plus I get to keep the fob.
Well, you might be able to get a second phone line for less.
Many of us are cheap bastards. I pay approx $12/month for dialup through eskimo.com. My shell access is perfectly acceptable in response time, as well as the websites I visit (slashdot can be a little slow, but google, yahoo, christdot.org, and the informational sites I visit all load at a decent speed).
In addition, I'm not even at 56k. I'm connecting on a used 28.8 modem because my computer came with one of those stupid winmodems and I had to switch with my parents.
It's really not a bad gig. I have SDSL at work, so I can download anything I want overnight at work, and burn CDs to bring it home. I'm not missing anything.
Engineering and the Ultimate
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
Many people, especially young people, use Hotmail,Yahoo, MSN, and probably Gmail pretty soon. That's the solution to non-portable ISP email addresses right there.
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.
I took the advice of using a provider-independent e-mail address a long time ago, and I have certainly not regretted it. If you were able to buy totally transparent telephone forwarding service so that your number was one degree removed from your provider, number portability would never have become an issue. Of course we really can't afford to go handing out twice as many numbers since there is a limit to the number available before splitting and/or overlaying area codes. (Or maybe we could, if the forwarding numbers got their own area codes.)
In any case, if anyone I know changes their e-mail address due to a change of provider, I advise then to get a forwarding address now while it's still relatively painless and save themselves a lot of trouble down the road.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
But in my case, it was cheaper to buy a USB memory fob and just download what I need at work or at the library. Plus I get to keep the fob.
I second that. I'm still transfering the last of the old time radio I found and downloaded on lunch two weeks ago. DSL reports makes DSL and Cable look like Dial-up compaired to my work connection. I need a bigger keyfob. 128 Meg is too small for a lunch break download session. I'd rather have my ~20 Meg DL speed instead of DSL or cable at 0.128 Meg/sec. Dial-up at home is just for weekend e-mail and Slashdot.
The truth shall set you free!
And telephone companies didn't? You lost me there. Even if that is the case, they certainly do pay for the continual maintenance of the telephone lines, so they have a right to them.
The fact the cable company paid to lay their lines should not give them absolute control. The rights to install the lines where they did, on public and private property, are granted by the local government, presumably in the interest of the public. If the local government doesn't like what the cable company is doing, they can kick them out, and replace them with another provider. Anyhow, the fact that the lines are installed gives the government the right to decide who gets to use which lines, and the FCC decided that the cable company gets to have a monopoly on internet access over their cable lines. Telecos weren't so lucky... I guess they didn't "donate" enough to the right politicans.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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 $10 for dial-up and use rabbit-ears (I get NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and UPN just fine) for TV?
The major reason I dropped all of my cable service was because I couldn't get SCI-FI unless I subscribed to digital cable. That pissed me off.
Broadband is nice, but like other people have said, dial-up is just fine for surfing around. Yes, I do updates to all of my boxes at home. In fact, my home network runs through my Linux machine running a caching name server, iptables firewall, and ppp on demand. I have a lot of automated processes to keep all of my machines current with patches and security updates (Windows and Linux), and they work just the same over dial-up as they did over broadband.
As far as waiting to connect, it only takes about 20 seconds or so for my modem to dial and connect. Big deal.
It seems everybody misses the point. For several years I had 64kbit broadband. Why would I call something only marginally faster than 56K "broadband"? Because of entirely different mode of access - the "always-on" connection. It changes the way you think about Internet, it is no longer something you do once a day to read e-mail and chat on AIM - it is now something you do when you need something from Internet. You no longer need to connect to the Net, you are connected all the time. This is also useful for family access, when there is more than one Internet user.
Right now I have 256kbit connection which is also much cheaper (60$/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.