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Broadband Majority in US
TheSync writes "NetworkWorldFusion has a report that the majority of US Internet users now connect using broadband, according to NetRatings. There are 63 million broadband users (51%) and 61 million (49%) dial-up users in the US. Broadband was most prevalent among people ages 18 to 20."
Wow, I'm really amazed people agreed to do this. The FA doesn't mention it, but I wonder if they were compensated in some manner.
No way in hell I'd want someone to know how often I visit tubgirl..
But seriously, in my mind this is akin to hardware "spyware" - I wonder if these same people would agree to having a key logger installed.. Maybe this is one of the reasons spyware is so prolific? Maybe some people just don't care what the corporate overloads know about them?
(I never said they were smart.....)
feh. stuff.
Dial-up is dead!
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
It was ME! I was the 51st %!
Ok, so I really wasn't. But after a horrible 9 month period with only dialup, and as of this past Tuesday, I finally have broadband once again. I had to take a half day off of work to get it installed, but it was worth it!
*hugs cable modem*
"oh, how I've missed you..."
.... virus / spyware / trojan / hacking activity has grown 51%.
...comes unprecendented amounts of spam and viruses.
How do people stand dial-up? I would be all over this issue if I didnt have several choices in my small town for broadband.. ewww dial-up!!
The Internet (yes, the Internet) is running at the slowest speed ever, due to the clog being offered forth by the spam zombies, unpatched Windows boxes mass-scanning entire subnets due to virus and worm infection, and residential porn downloads.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Its cause they like to download pron XD, they need that broadband.
This kinda snuck up, on me at least...a few years ago the broadband users were the elite (most notably in gaming), and it was like this special deal...now it seems dial-up users are definitely becoming the minority. I would say P2P has played a large factor in this, every friend/relative I know that has gotten it in the last 2 years, have wanted it so they could go download songs/movies etc. Even gaming seems to be losing reasoning for higher bandwidth connections.
I know nothing
I can skip all that messy HTML/CSS stuff now and just make my web pages giant graphics. Text is so over-rated.
That age range is popular because internet and email is needed for schooling. Many college students live off campus, but need a decent connection to the internet. Many universities have much of the coursework and homework assignments online. Email is also the preferred communication method
the total number of Americans using the Internet at home grew less than 10%
American internet-use has peaked. The asian controls now are the majority of internet users...
Are any of you paying translators to convert your sites due to this amazing trend? I don't know what to do. Our companies missing half of their potential customers?
AC
(to the United States) for catching up with the rest of the world.
Now problem is how many of those dial-up users are still AoLers who are creating the majority of the problems on the intenet (ie: opening up silly attachments, spamming, not trolling slashdot...)
So, we've got broadband. What's the next big thing?
I'm serious - I'd love a 10Mbs or 100Mbs connection - when is that kind of thing going to be domestically available? When are we going fiber optic?
Now all we need is a fiber optic majority.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
"NetRatings, based in New York and Milpitas, Calif., used a panel of 50,000 participants selected through calls to randomly generated phone numbers. Each participating household provides a profile of the users in the home, and a device connected to each Internet-linked PC in the home logs where those users go on the Internet. Users have to log in to identify themselves when they start using the computer, Ryan said."
Seems to me that sample size is just too low for an even remotely accurate portrayal. Personally, I still think the vast majority of folks are using dialup. There's a whole lot of people who just dial in, check their mail, log off
Someday, when wireless has permeated the remote locations, dial-up connections may be thrown away (or 1%).
The next wave will be the fiber networks that can push Gigs. Then the existing (slow?) broadband will go to the light users (dial-uppers now), and the business/power users/media hogs will grab the Broader-band.
(Repeat until the Teranet/Petanet is reached)
I guess now it's OK to vote for Bush. Kerry promotes broadband.
With the restrictive TOS and intoxicating speed, people are being placed on the unidirectional, mass media owned Corporate Internet.
P2P and any open ports will soon be outlawed because they are only used by criminals "stealing" copyrighted materials and of course, terrorists.
Brought to you by Comcast...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
With the low prices of Cable/DSL - even for a "slower" 1.5Mb service, I can't believe that anyone is still signing up for those "optimized" (it's called a proxy stupid) dialup services.
;-)
Last time I had to dial in - I just logged off after a couple of minutes to prevent a small mass murder of bystanders...
get a free ipod
...that dial-up works well enough for me. Most of my time is spent on Gmail, Slashdot, IRC, and a few other low-clutter websites.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I wouldn't guess that from living in Indiana. Maybe in the past month or so there has been a change over, but I still talk to a lot of people who are using dialup and don't know what DSL or Cable modems are.
"Yeah, my modem has a cable on it that runs into the phone jack"
As someone moving from home (dialup) and to school (broadband), the answer is price. My parents get dialup for something like $14 a month, whereas 3Mbps cable internet is a shade under $60. People that get dialup don't get it for it's speed, they get it for the price. My parents don't use the internet at home so they don't know the aggrevation of trying to download a 266MB Windows XP SP2 update over modem.
Verizon is beginning to role out up to 30-Mbit/s fiber connections, with the 5 Down / 2 Up Mbit/s connection priced at $40/mo, and 15 Down / 2 Up at $50/mo. The 30 MBit down / 5 Up is expected to be about $200/mo.
Keep it up, U.S. Pretty soon, you might catch up to where Canadians were back in January, 2003. ;-)
I'm guessing it is because we pay less for high speed Internet access that accounts for the difference. You can find high speed Internet here for as low as about $18.75 U.S. per month, with 'fuller' plans available for $30 U.S. per month. I pay $48.75 U.S. for a small-office cable modem package, including modem rental, and that gives me permission to host servers. Virtually no package from our cable provider or ADSL provider actually blocks servers, but they do not officially allow them either. I could almost certainly find cheaper packages but not by very much.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
NetRatings, based in New York and Milpitas, Calif., used a panel of 50,000 participants selected through calls to randomly generated phone numbers.
I recently got broadband a few months ago. Before that I was on dialup and only had one phoneline. Had they tried to call me for this survey, they would have gotten a busy signal.
I wonder how many dialup users were not interviewed because of this.
You can thank crappy 56k porn stream for wide adoption. Oh, and the promise of MP3s and warez helped too. I still see broadband ads that tout the benefits of faster music downloading (and not necessarily iTunes et al *wink*).
....Users have to log in to identify themselves when they start using the computer....
Yeah, just what I want to do, log into my own individual PC at home just to use it.
NetRatings, based in New York and Milpitas, Calif., used a panel of 50,000 participants selected through calls to randomly generated phone numbers. Each participating household provides a profile of the users in the home, and a device connected to each Internet-linked PC in the home logs where those users go on the Internet. Users have to log in to identify themselves when they start using the computer, Ryan said.
With that said, is it safe to assume that the people that agreed to do this would be generally more savvy than generic dialup population? Is it also safe to assume that people with broadband are generally more interested in the Internet and computers than their dialup counterparts? (and possibly therefore more likely to participate when they got that "random" call?) Granted there's huge cross-over, I may be over-generalizing, and the assumption doesn't accomidate to users that have "no other choice" than dialup, but how accurate could this possibly be?
-Aaron
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
Most Internet users between the ages of 18-20 are college students. It is also Dorm Storm month so the figures will definitely show a bias toward broadband use.
US. Broadband was most prevalent among people ages 18 to 20.
Well...that stat didn't suprise me: A big portion of 18-20 year olds are in college, of course they'll have access to broadband! But then again, my conjecture depends on this: Did they count dorm rooms as "home usage" in this?! Kids just out of high school might not have the resources to set up a broadband connection...unless they were provided one by their dorm/apartment complex...
I remember a figure from last year saying broadband was only in 25% of US internet connected households. This site didn't give any information on past history based on their collection methods.
As the country gets more and more broadband users, are we getting more and more bandwidth, or are we just spreading it out. I personally feel that my bandwidth has gone from sufficent to insufficent... how do the rest of you feel?
Your mammas flamebait.
What aggravates me is that nobody understands the real issue - there are big areas of the US that can't get anything better than dial-up. People don't move to rural areas to get away from the technology, they go there to get away from the cities. Believe me, there are a lot of small-town folks that are pretty p***ed about having to wait till they visit their big-city buddy to get a first post in on /.
BROADBAND FOR PODUNK!
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
consent is probably clicking "yes" on Neilsen's EULA :)
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
"Broadband was most prevalent among people ages 18 to 20."
Can you please be more specific about the age group. And, what - do they stop using it after those couple years?
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
"NetRatings, based in New York and Milpitas, Calif., used a panel of 50,000 participants selected through calls to randomly generated phone numbers. Each participating household provides a profile of the users in the home, and a device connected to each Internet-linked PC in the home logs where those users go on the Internet. Users have to log in to identify themselves when they start using the computer, Ryan said."
Did the pollers stop to think that the fact that they were *calling* people might in and of itself skew the sample results? After all, people who have broadband are far more likely to answer the phone when the pollers call. No dial-up busy signals to contend with.
61M + 63M = 124M US Internet users, out of 300M Americans. The majority of Americans, about 60%, aren't on the Net (except maybe in their involuntary videos from New Orleans). I'd love to see a map showing their distribution around the country. With layers for TV viewing hours.
--
make install -not war
a statistic not to be overlooked.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Dear God,
Please, pretty, pretty please, don't ever make me go back to Dialup.
If necessary, you can take any limbs of your choosing, just please leave a mouse hand and at least one eye.
Thanks.
"Sig free in '03!"
Isn't it funny that our broadband here in the US is so slow? I checked and bbb lines at 24mbit are going for about 67 bucks a month but yet most people in the US pay that for 3-5mb down and wimpy 384k uploads.
Our broadband here is more like dialup in comparison to other countries lol. my line with SBC costs $53/mo for 3mb/384... though really it should be the 'budget' plan costing $9.95/mo considering its dynamic and SLOW compared to 'real' lines.
I'm hoping our US providers will eventually bring our country's internet to the top of the industry - or do they really like lagging behind?
A new type of "haves and have knots"?
(I'd be in knots, too, if I still had dial-up).
I've been on broadband for over 5 years. When I see someone do dialup I just get this "WTF?!" expression. I can't believe it. Some people still use dialup? Inconceivable!
The report says that the second largest group of users (at 58%) were children between the ages of 2 and 11. It is not as if these users can subscribe to a broadband connection by themselves! I wonder who consumes such numbers. Perhaps these numbers are used to target ads to the right group - but that would mean using services like AOL (shudder).
-- Off to build a bridge between the twin peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Colleges offer broadband on campus. When kids go home to rural suburbia, they may have to go back to using the phone.
Great, ok, nice.
Now let's get down to business. Who's got the best list of the IP addresses of all these broadband blocks so we can blacklist them? It's just a matter of time before almost every single one becomes worm-infected and starts up rogue SMTP relays? I've had it with this crap.
The majority of spam now comes from zombie machines on broadband connections. If the ISPs themselves won't release the IP lists of their DUL users, we should set up a master one ourselves so we can stop this zombie army.
This would make a great slashdot poll.
I pay 35$~ish and normally I can pull down about 150Kbps, but ive hit 200 before. I felt a little jipped at first, but its been remarkably reliable, and it seems my isp actually cares about security.
no
Getting broadband to over half the US is a bit more difficult than getting it to 50%+ of e.g. Europe.
The US is a smidge larger than most countries, and the additonal area means additional cost to get new/improved/upgraded connectivity from point A to points !A. The result is that in many places the cost of upgrading compared poorly to the potential return and was not considered worthwhile.
Side note: I live in a rather small town, and we had the option of either DSL or cable modem in 1999. The town is small enough that one can't help but live within the requisite distance to the CO or cable company.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
SBC is now offering 1.5Mbps/128kbps for $26.95 a month. Thats two dollars more a month than AOL dialup and $5 more a month than SBC's dialup. It also comes with a free modem and home installation kit with a one year contract. That was enough to get me to switch over my parents (finally), and the last time I went home half the people in the neighborhood who didn't have DSL and some who had cable have moved over to SBC's offering. Apparently they also offer a 3.0Mbps/384kbps for $36.99 too...if I had a landline I'd probably drop my cable for that.
...when I'm getting tons of netlag while trying to play UT2004 online because my neighbors (on the same cable segment) are hogging all the bandwidth constantly DL'ing pr0n. You gotta get your priorities straight... Unreal Tournament is much more important than anyone's sex life.
I argue that P2P applications are the killer app for broadband. What do you think eats up bandwidth these days besides a savage slashdotting?
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
I go to IU and obviously 99.9% of people in bloomington have broadband. I also have family and friends in south bend and indy who are all cable modem now. It probably depends on where you're at and who you hang out with. Not to mention if they've ever gotten a taste of broadband before.
I'd say the sample size more than sufficient. The problem is how they selected participants. If anyone you know uses dial up you'll immediately know what I mean. Try calling them. The phone is always fucking busy! NetRatings hang up, and additional numbers are called until they get the 50K participants. It's online natural selection, favoring those who do not have dialup! :)
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
The 'killer app' (shouldn't that be enabling feature?) is video chat, it just isn't widespread enough yet because not many people have cameras. When the cameras get cheaper and nice ones like the iSight come over to the PC, this might become a lot more widespread.
Didn't think it'd be that useful, but I use it a lot now.
When I was growing up, the last thing I wanted to do was sit inside and surf the internet. Hell, the internet wasn't even the INTERNET when I was growing up. We had to play sports and go exploring in the woods beind a friend's backyard to have fun..you know, actually interact with the world OUTSIDE of the computer screen. It makes me feel sorry for kids today. First they get them hooked on surfing the internet, then they take away Saturday Morning Cartoons..what's next? No more recess?
"Broadband" has diluted to the point where it means "not connecting over the telephone line". It doesn't even mean connecting at speeds higher than 56k (real connection speed, when shared) anymore.
In Korea, most households have 100 Mbit/s bidirectional. In Scandinavia, 10-20 Mbit/s bidirectional is the norm. In the US, 2 Mbit/s download and less upload is considered much. Yet all of these go under the bland moniker "broadband".
A much better meter would be, say, "average household bandwidth".
You will have to pry my 2400 baud modem from my cold dead hands. Now off to download Doom 3.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
So start your own WISP or something. Sheesh.
There's a very simple reason for this: tech companies, including those offering bandwidth, love to seperate Americans from their money. It's a simple issue of the fact that a good chunk of the American populace is stupid enough to go for whatever they'll sell you at whatever prices you demand, as Americans have money. This mass of money and refusal to know anything outside of where to get food, drink, clothing, and shelter has caused the greedy executives (who know this information from experience) to restrict our bandwidth to super-slow speeds and raise our rates through the roof. Yeah, they make a good profit doing this. Most know that laying the cable isn't as expensive as they make it sound, and that the service isn't too hard to offer. They've seen Europe and Asia. They know what they can do. However, most Americans, who don't leave the country, and in fact barely know that the world isn't defined by our borders, don't know what the Internet providers can do at this time.
Of course, if you need an example of how Americans are more than willing to be ignorant of anything, take a look at our president. He's as willfully ignorant as most Americans. That's why so many people still support him...aside from those who know that their money allows them to control him. It's all a matter of collusion and pocketbook-raping the stupid, overmoneyed Americans.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
SBC-Yahoo DSL (which is slower, granted) is something like $26 a month in a lot of places....
Site is getting sloooow... Here's a mirror.
So because I still have dialup at home does that mean I am eligible for minority scholarships? :)
Living in the bustling metropolis of Lawrence Kansas in 1996, my 4 roomates (and a few other friends who came over constantly) were so eager for the bandwidth we had two cablemodems installed (primarily for Quake!). Unfortunately we didn't luck out as early adopters - the service was beyond terrible, and frankly nearly unusable for a good couple years despite intense complaints from us and others. I can't recall the price, but I don't think it was more than $50/month
:).
In 1998, I moved to Austin Texas, and though there were no real offerings of DSL or Cable here yet, there were a few apartment complexes with one or more T1s running to them, of which I moved into. It was excellent service for a mere 24.95 per month. I then spent a couple years in the Hill Country about 45 miles outsie of Austin, and had Direcway 2-way Satellite for $55/month (plus a few hundred for (my choice) purchasing the equipment. For all the bad I have heard, I was happy with their service. Latency was enormous (no gaming), but downstream I'd average 50-60k/sec, though upstream was slow as dirt (5-6k)... worked in all weather except strong storms.
Now I have DSL for $26/month here in 2004 back within the Austin City Limits. So when I still hear of people without any sort of broadband connection, it's somewhat mind-boggling
People don't move to rural areas to get away from the technology, they go there to get away from the cities.
Do you know what a side effect of getting away from the cities is? Getting away from the technology. The cost for installing broadband is dependent more on the area covered than the people covered. It's trivial to run cable to 30 houses when they're all on the same block. When they're each 0.5 mi away from each other, it's not so easy, and the return on investment goes to the shitter.
When you move out of densely populated areas, you should not expect the same level of service, be it sewers, trash collection, police and fire protection, utility service, transportation options, retail access, etc. You pay lower property taxes out there for a reason.
I wonder if some people are not as anal as you?
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Then why do I get stuck helping people who still use AOL dial up?!?! I grew a beard waiting for windows update to download a few fixes.
When I was growing up, the last thing I wanted to do was sit inside and surf the internet.
:(
Ah, instead you sat inside and watched
Saturday Morning Cartoons
?
Notice a connection at all? Personally, I woulda killed for BBS access on the C64 durnig a rainy day. Too bad long distance used to cost a small fortune back then
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
and still no First Post. ,-/
And worked for UITS last year, and can say that I don't know anybody on dial up ;) All the dial up people I dealt with were IUPUI students. I of course don't deal with too many "townies" as a student and working tech help for students though. But students do compose over half of Bloomington's population 8 months a year.
I tested my personal site on dial-ups and the wait while loading pictures kills me. So, I keep it simple and for every 10 "this page looks like it was made in 1996", I get one "wow, I like that it loads quickly".
I reckon I should "upgrade" it by making it slow loading -- I actually make "real" sites at work. Nice long, bloated with javascript & graphics sites. I've had clients that want text added to go along with rotating stars and the other 7th grade girl lay-out (I apologize to any 7th grade girls reading this -- I'll try not to outsource your work anymore).
I guess it's my fault from sticking with lynx for long. I'm ingrained to make pages fast loading and I like crappy looking sites that load fast.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
Right now, /. hands out mod points for logging on from different IPs. I suppose this is to... I don't know. I really have no idea why this is part of the algorithm to hand out mod points. But seeing as how most broadband connections have fairly long lived IP address, isn't it time to drop this requirement? No longer is it someone living on their college or job's fat pipe. It's just a regular person.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Satellite broadband is available and targets such people. Though last I spoke to a user, the setup costs were still higher than cable or DSL.
And who says dial-up is slow?
It might not be that simple. Imagine if the backbone providers did exercise this supposed power and used it to squish zombies and other Internet Undead. Something tells me there would be a hue and cry about excessive corporate power over the Internet.
Backbone providers likely see it as a utility. You can use electricity to power a hospital or power a meth lab. It's essentially out of their purvue, and they likely want to stay out of policing what people do with the bandwidth they provide. It's good business, and it's probably better for the rest of us, too.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
The rest of the first world welcomes you.
Why not use Powerpoint Presentations? No, I am not kidding. Someone asked me last week how he could put his site up. I sat down in front of his box and he showed me, very proud, his first homepage. Wich turned out to be a Powerpoint Presentation. It wasn't easy explaining to him that this was not the smartest idea.
So move out of the stix hillbilly. Seriously, you have options, like satellite (and the huge tariff that goes with it) but then you get the peace and quiet of small town life. Win some, lose some.
No more summer vacation. http://www.cato.org/research/education/articles/ca nsumvac.html
Now that dial up users are a minority they'll whine about being repressed by the broadband majority.
Back in late 2000, we were redesigning our corporate internet site (a banking site, mind you). Some psycho in Marketing kept arguing for some Flash spewed monstrosity. When I brought up the issue with increased download times, she said while true, broadband use would skyrocket soon, making the issue moot. I countered with a then just released report from Gartner saying that dialup would still account for 40% of internet users in 2004.
Turns out the number's closer to 50%. However, I still hereby claim gloating rights. Linda, up yours. I was right, you were wrong.
Yup. This regrettable state of the AMerican mind is brought on by the fact that most AMericans were raised by the fucking teevee! The teevee was the babysitter and the companion. THe fruit don't fall too far from the tree. Hillary was right: it does take a village to raise a child. Mass media was the village that raised many Americans. And the result is that they were raised to be good little consumers.
We do pay more for broadband because we let the rich people and the corporations run our countru for us. We were never taught to bargain, to haggle with the powers that be. You can see this by how we no longer are able to shut down our own country. Over in many European countries they periodically go on large strikes, almost country-wide strike. THat is how you haggle and negotiate with the powers that be. But we were never taught to do that, because so many of us were raised by the teevee, which is the agent of the powers that be....our community has been hollowed out.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
And why is that? Because they're getting it for free from their college/university. They're certainly not paying for it themselves.
Sorry, dial-up is still the way of the average citizen. Cost and perceived degree of difficulty of the hardware still keeps many away.
-jls
Techno-pagan
If 90% of our population was clustered near the border of your crappy country, we'd have 90% market penetration for broadband. Korea kicks your ass in broadband penetration, so in the words of our dainty first lady wannabe "shove it"
That's what!
-Tut
Health-Hack.com
I'm not entirely sure it it's standard across the board, but I know my grandmother is signed up for this, and they give her a $50 savings bond every quarter. $100 - $200 a year (depending on how long you want to wait to cash it in) isn't too bad, and they say openly that they're going to record data. Between that and the fact that no ads are served (well, not directly; one could argue that most ad serving is controlled by these statistics, but Nielson isn't doing it), I'd say this is decidedly not spyware.
There was a lot of talk before about needing govt. assitance to jumpstart broadband in the US. Turns out free market works just fine. No one paid for something they didn't want through taxes.
Is it me, or are most high-speed Internet users (cable, DSL, ADSL, satellite, and broadband) impatient? It seems as if high-speed Internet has destroyed their ability to wait for things to download when on slower connections at different places. I had a friend, who used cable all of the time. When his cable provider was down for a week, he had to use his dialup AOL account. He told me that he almost went insane trying to deal with the speed of 56k. Does high-speed Internet "change" somebody into a whole new, impatient person? It seems to the end user that once the Internet is instantaneous, everything should be. Are they simply too used to fast Internet to deal with anything else that might be slower?
I would be more interested in the ratio of broadband to dialup among people who actually pay for their own access. i.e. home users especially. If this number includes users at high school and college, and the workplace, too, where free access is provided to everyone then it doesn't tell the whole story. And of the self-payers, what percentage are on dialup because that is all that is available versus they don't want to pay the extra for hi-speed.
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
I like how they don't even bother to define the term. Do they mean "faster than 56k", or do they mean "always on", or what?
So be a pro, give folks the option... scale the site to both needs, let them choose.
personally i just got sick of testing sites and now guarantee my site to only really work with any ease on ie6 or later over a fast connection. (work is different though... we still use nutscrape 4)
bah!*@%!
Now where are all those kiddies who said Microsoft was dumb because Xbox Live was BB only back in 2001/2002? :)
Jesus Christ - I just *had* to look up tubgirl. That is, without a doubt, the most disqusting thing I've ever seen.
With SP2 weighing in at over 250 MB, virus and spyware patches being written almost DAILY, you NEED a broadband connection now just to stay safe!
I was just having this discussion with one of my relatives the other day. I told her that if she wants to be on the Internet, she's going to have to 'pay to play'.
Unless all you're going to do is check your email (and even then it can be a risky proposition), than it seems now more than ever, dial-up isn't even an option anymore.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
And I single handedly got farscape back on the air. I just filled in Farscape on all the blank spots in the little book.
There's really no call to use HTML whatsoever. Not when Flash can make your web page look just like a TV show, kind of. At least you can finally throw in some cool music and lots of spinning logos. And now that there are no more dial-up users, there's no call to compress the Flash animations either. So go ahead and throw in a bunch of large bitmaps, too. Remember, people don't want to go to boring sites where all you do is read.
broadband "user" is an account. Remember, most of these are household accounts being used by multiple people. You're comparing apples to oranges.
-
Up here in Canada, if you're on broadband, you're a tool. Even the most illiterate users are off dial up.
The article cites all statistics in "users", which are people:
"In July, there were an estimated 63 million broadband users, or 51% of all home Internet users, compared with 61.3 million dial-up users, 49% of the total."
"[...] Americans using the Internet at home [grew to] 124 million in July 2004"
"The 2000 U.S. Census listed the total U.S. population at just over 281 million."
They're neither accounts, nor apples, nor oranges, but rather people.
--
make install -not war
Hi there. I'm a Slashdotter who's spent the past 17 years of his life living on dusty dirt roads in backwoods Tennesseean cities and towns of less than 20,000 people each. I'd like you to know that I now hate 51% of the nation with a burning, burning passion. Therefore, I request that 51% of the nation hand over their IP address so that I may begin transmitting viruses at a rate of at least 2.5KB/sec. . . . Please?
[Terribly witty statement]
Do sympatico and other bb providers in Canada get rid of the ridiculous download caps?
Enforced quotas seem to be disappearing, although it seems to have played some small part in keeping costs down and service more consistent during the growing pains for or five years ago. Today I know of no major broadband provider where I live (Alberta) that will cut you off for downloading more than a specific amount of data. However, it is common to have usage monitored (for capacity, not content) and to be extra-billed for very high usage. I've found, however, that to exceed the cost of what most US residents pay for comparable service I'd have to fill my hard drive every month.
I would also guess that even within Canada the area I live in is somewhat exceptional in regards to communication technology. Alberta was the first place in the entire world to have commercial use of fibre optic communications between two sites. It was also the first place in the world (or at least North America--can't remember which) to roll out high-speed internet over cable (in 1996 to 1997), and the first in Canada (and one of the first in the world) to have DSL. Alberta is the home to the first digitally switched public phone network on the continent as well.
A lot of harping has been going on about how the US is a big country and that is why it is taking longer to adopt broadband. When it is brought up that Canada is even bigger and is quite a bit ahead of the US in that area they counter that most of the population is squished up within 100km of the US border. I really don't get this argument at all. The city of Edmonton, Alberta is somtheing like 500 km away from the border and it got cable broadband internet before ANYONE in the US did (I know, I lived there at the time). Also, if you calculate the area of land within 100km of the US border and figure out the population DENSITY in this region it is STILL less than half of the average density for the US.
Canada didn't excel in communications IN SPITE of being big and sparsely populated, it was BECAUSE of it. The distance between people made the need and demand that much greater, and as a result Candians either invent the technology or are among the first to make use of it. Too bad Canadians have such a hard time making money off it though--it all ends up getting built somewhere else.
I'm ingrained to make pages fast loading and I like crappy looking sites that load fast.
Actually, there is no reason to sacrifice good presentation for loading time. CSS is extremely effective in designing good presentable websites with no dependancy on images.
Seems to me that many broadband users keep a spare dial-up connection in their back pocket (just in case broadband goes down and you're pushing a deadline). When they made their calculation did they account for the overlap? Maybe the percentage of broadband users would be higher if they did so.
Yeah, what I now "have not" is a life, and $55/month to spend on other stuff. But it sure beats the 33.6 that my "56k" dialup pulled most of the time...
Freedom: "I won't!"
So, 100% of people either use dialup or broadband? then where do I fit in?
Are you an Easynews customer? (www.easynews.com)
...for you guys as well - seems the yanks are always being raped by companies who charge big dollar amounts for bandwidth (hence the thousands of sites which moan about bandwidth stealing)
Its a funny old world over there, you spend oil like its free, but bandwidth is apparently a scarce commodity.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If 49% of people are (like me) still on dial-up, then why are there so many websites that only work well on broadband?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
...that it's time to upgrade my 300 baud modem?
---
However, there are still a few free dial-up services out there. Before I got Comcast, I used an anonymous PPP logon to NoCharge.com, which only has service in western Washington(me) and the New York area. No ads, no software, no SMTP(unfortunately) but overall a very good service. It's comforting to know I can fall back on them when I have to move and cancel my broadband service.
Sleep is futile.
This study fails to take into account those of us who aggregate our DSL and dialup connections together for ULTRA-SPEED . All of you losers out there can keep your 3000Kbps connections, I'm surfing at 3048Kbps. Suckers.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
Ah you wimp. Throw in some big instructional quicktime movies, like: "How to click on a link?", and "Scrolling for dummies."
Let me say this about that. From the time the telephone was invented until you could be pretty sure of being able to get a phone line no matter where you went was about 75 years. Cable was invented roughly 45 years ago (as we speak) and there are still plenty of rural areas where cable is not available. Can you guess why? Your post indicates .NOT.
Cable plant (for instance) costs about $18,000 per mile to build. It just ain't possible to convince a BANK that they should lend you the money for construction if you can't show X customers/mile @ X $/month added to the system.
DSL is a recent comer in the mix. Broadband via cable or DSL both 'enjoy' the same kind of constraints. It takes $$$$ to make it happen and very few companies have it in the coffers to just make it happen. They have to finance expansion and show that the expansion can pay for itself in a reasonable period of time.
The upshot is that you have to take a deep breath, relax, and enjoy the show because it ain't happening any faster than the national economy can deal with it. Consider the early days of cable. The transition from broadcast ready tuners (in TVs and later in VCRs) to cable ready tuners involved devices in the bazillions. It took $X times bazillions to make the transition. There was no way it was going to happen before the general populace was ready to foot the bill.
I hope I haven't bored you with this, but it's a reality check that has to happen from time to time. I'm sorry, but neither cable nor DSL is going to happen for the customer that is in the 'four homes passed per mile' area anytime real soon.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
broadband users and AOL users are pretty much paying the same monthly fee.
/end cablemodem fanboy rant
Seriously though, I love my cable modem. I first got it 5 or 6 years ago here in Canada. Back then speeds were much faster though. I could download linux software from sunsite.unc.edu at 600KB/sec on a bad day.. Now i get around 100~200KB/sec downstream on average. Still pretty good for porn..
OK, in most of the English-speaking world, "Broadband" is just a synonym for "High Bandwidth". But since this is Slashdot, I'm allowed to pick a technical nit and point out that the "correct" definition refers to a kind of multiplexing.
kekekekeke __^_____^__
In other words, you = failure.
Indianapolis. Bottom fell out of economy, back to dialup. Hire me!
http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/strategy2004/ strategy_part2.html
In Hong Kong:
- Household penetration for broadband Internet service: 50% in 2003
- Mobile phone penetration: 104% in 2003
50% was a year ago.
Broadband was most prevalent among people ages 18 to 20.
So much bandwidth, so much porn! Eureka!
I'm sure college kids between 18 and 20 downloading through P2P has nothing to do with this trend...
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
IIRC PowerPoint can export to HTML. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all...
I'd like to see a map of Internet usage overlaid with average income, think this would be more interesting than tv use. I am guessing most people in USA can get access to a tv, and most people watch more than one hour a day (how many hours a day to average USians spend in front of computers, that would be interesting as well).
Procreate my good man! We need more folks like you on the net! Not everyone uses it for songs, videos and naked girls (in numerous formats). When I go to a site, I'm looking for information(**), not Flash-Crap.
*: But when going to
*: Except for the occasional porn run, once every 6 months or so. (Yes, I said months, thats my story, and I'm sticking to it!)
I'm only speaking for Australia here, but broadband is quite expensive here, in comparison to US prices. I would imagine this is the same as other coutries as australia is ranked 13th in the world for broadband uptake.
There just isn't a big enough market to support lower prices. Yet they have such a small market because no one wants to pay thier prices, it a vicous cycle.
To illustrate this point, if I were to switch from dialup to ADSL (you can only get cable in major cities here) $50 a month would get me 256/64K line with a 5-10 Gb cap, and thats with the cheapest of ISPs.
You are probably looking at around $100+ for 1500/256K line with a reasonable cap.
I think if the rest of the world could drop thier prices enough to create a market, we would see broadband uptake soar.
Sorry everyone!
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic