Slashdot Mirror
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...'
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.)
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 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.