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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!!!
.... 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...)
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!!!!
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.
"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
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.
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
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?