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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%.
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
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
(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?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
...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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I have broadband only because I have the knowlege to set up a 1 mile 802.11b point to point link to someone willing to let me put DSL on their phone-line.
Before that, I lived with a 56k full-time dial-up connection for many years.
That only applies to 48% of the 51% which is interesting due to 76% of the 49% which are on dial-up. This concludes that 99% of percentages are made up along with 99% of females on net being naykeed.
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
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.
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.
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.
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
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. A basic understanding of statistics indicates that you can have 95% confidence in your results with as small a sample as about 1,000 people. 50,000 is just hedging the bet by increasing the sample fiftyfold; the confidence interval there is likely even larger.
However, it's very likely with the 51%/49% results here that, due to the margin of error, there isn't a detectable majority of either broadband or dialup users. The statistics for qualitative questions like "what kind of Internet do you use" are a little fuzzy (i.e. way beyond what I learned in my AP=basic-college-intro-101-level Stats), but the principle is the same.
I would absoutely trust that -about- 49% and 51% of Internet users surveyed use dialup and broadband, respectively, but I'm not sure that there's a detectable majority.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
"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
A lot of people I know don't do anything more than read email, or at best get the latest scores for their favorite sports.
It's hard to sell these folks on the idea of paying 5 times as much by telling them it'll be "faster", when their entire online experience lasts a half hour a month.
The "killer app" for broadband hasn't really materialized yet.
That said, I could never go back to dialup.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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 $9.95/mo considering its dynamic and SLOW compared to 'real' lines.
I'm hoping our US providers will eventually bring our country's internet to the top of the industry - or do they really like lagging behind?
A new type of "haves and have knots"?
(I'd be in knots, too, if I still had dial-up).
The report says that the second largest group of users (at 58%) were children between the ages of 2 and 11. It is not as if these users can subscribe to a broadband connection by themselves! I wonder who consumes such numbers. Perhaps these numbers are used to target ads to the right group - but that would mean using services like AOL (shudder).
-- Off to build a bridge between the twin peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
Great, ok, nice.
Now let's get down to business. Who's got the best list of the IP addresses of all these broadband blocks so we can blacklist them? It's just a matter of time before almost every single one becomes worm-infected and starts up rogue SMTP relays? I've had it with this crap.
The majority of spam now comes from zombie machines on broadband connections. If the ISPs themselves won't release the IP lists of their DUL users, we should set up a master one ourselves so we can stop this zombie army.
But don't forget... They only used people with Phone Numbers... Look at a whole group of people without home phones they missed all together. Personally, I'm beyond the reaches of cable and I don't look for BellSouth to upgrade anytime either :(
This would make a great slashdot poll.
I pay 35$~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
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.
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 wonder if any of the participants reside in places like Alaska, or South Dakota. Just seems like those places amongst many aren't likely to have vast options on their method of connecting to the net.
There's something else about those places too... oh, right! No one lives there! Okay, sure, people do, but the population density is vastly lower than other parts of the country. So even if everyone uses dialup in these areas, they will only have a small effect on the overall numbers.
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.
"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
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 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
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
That's right, all that tuition, room and board I paid in school was just imaginary...
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?
broadband "user" is an account. Remember, most of these are household accounts being used by multiple people. You're comparing apples to oranges.
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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]
If 49% of people are (like me) still on dial-up, then why are there so many websites that only work well on broadband?
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