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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."
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.
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
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?
...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.
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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
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.
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a statistic not to be overlooked.
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If someone intentionally hampers $DEVICE and makes it liable to cause others harm (by infection, waste of bandwidth, etc), shouldn't the person that commited those acts (or the owner of $DEVICE) be liable?
I spent the time patching the system to the latest of everything, newest SP at the time, all the protection programs I could find, etc. Everything was set to run basically w/o userintervention.
He took over because he obviously knows more about computers than I do (being a devout WinME supporter) and went ahead and removed those pesky pieces of software.
I refused to help from then on out. Let him handle it when the machine is so slow and the webpages won't load properly.
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?
But don't forget... They only used people with Phone Numbers... Look at a whole group of people without home phones they missed all together. Personally, I'm beyond the reaches of cable and I don't look for BellSouth to upgrade anytime either :(
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
They still do diary research for local stations.
http://www.nielsenmedia.com/whatratingsmean/
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
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".
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.
We were a Nielsen Netratings family for awhile. About every quarter they'd mail us a $100 Savings Bond.
We had a small proxy server running that would log the pages we visited and (I guess) every once in awhile send a report off to the Overlords.
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
I was invited to be a nielsen internet household but they offered me nothing whatsoever to be one. I guess there's still more money in television advertising.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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