FCC: Broadband Usage Has Tripled Since 2001

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FCC: Broadband Usage Has Tripled Since 2001

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Sunday September 12, 2004 @05:06AM from the jumpy-jumpy dept.

Brainsur writes "According to Newsfactor more and more Americans are migrating to high-speed Internet service, with the number of broadband subscribers tripling in recent years, according to a comprehensive report from the Federal Communications Commission. The U.S. is making progress in delivering broadband access underserved areas, the report states. The report also says that the number of users of broadband services (speeds exceeding 200 kbps in both directions) soared to 28 million in December 2003 from 9.6 million in 2001."

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not bad.. by RyuuzakiTetsuya · 2004-09-12 05:08 · Score: 2, Insightful

I'm surprised too, that it's been that fast, but I really shouldn't be. Everyone and thier mothers now have Cox Cable for internet in my area..

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Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
1. Re:not bad.. by DrEldarion · 2004-09-12 05:38 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I'm surprised that it's not faster. Once people come to the realization that what they're paying for a second phone line plus their AOL/Earthlink subscription is more than it costs for broadband, they usually switch pretty quickly.
  
  I wonder why the broadband providers haven't been pushing that angle.
2. Re:not bad.. by Toresica · 2004-09-12 06:41 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Only people who live in or near cities.
  
  It's not possible to get broadband in remote places - Nothern Ontario, for instance.
Both directions? by Fooby · 2004-09-12 05:16 · Score: 5, Insightful

...broadband services (speeds exceeding 200 kbps in both directions)...
Hm, I get 1.5Mbps down, 128kbps up from Verizon DSL. Does this mean I don't have broadband?
It sure would be nice to have a fatter uplink, even if it wasn't a symmetric connection. Of course even though this is slow compared to connections in some countries I'm not complaining too loudly. A few years ago a dual-bonded ISDN 128kbps connection seemed would have been a dream come true.
Not that it matters... by QuickSilver_999 · 2004-09-12 05:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

Computer people can eat up excess capacity faster than it can be created. How many people here said when they got their first 20Meg HD "I'll NEVER fill up THAT much space!" I know I did.

All this really means is that in the near future web designers and multimedia providers will start to upgrade the amount of bandwidth needed, and the average person will still be screwed. We all saw it with the 2400 baud modem, the 14.4, the 28.8, and the 56K. We'll see it again with DSL and Cable. Until the day comes when web designers realize that too many geegaws ruin the experience, we'll continue to have this problem.

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- No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades really cramps his style.
1. Re:Not that it matters... by QuickSilver_999 · 2004-09-12 05:48 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  You miss understood. The problem is not the bigger and better hardware/bandwidth. The problem is that programmers and designers become more and more sloppy as things get bigger. One of the best word processors I ever used was Appleworks, which ran in 64K (128K if you wanted to do anything serious). And that 64K included the operating system!
  
  Now we have to have some from MicroSoft (which is rather an ironic name now that their programs have become so damn bloated. Maybe we should rename them MacroSoft) that take minutes to load on anything less than a 100% state of the art machine, and can only be used if you have a shitload of memory and hard drive space.
  
  Same for the bandwidth. Look what Microsoft tried to do with IRC! Let's send little cartoon representations of everyone on the chat line. After all, people have 28.8K modems now, we can waste a little bandwidth. *sigh* IRC did the job just fine, and still does it. We don't NEED to add crap to it like that.
  
  What it means though in this case is that even we will always have the problem of running out of bandwidth. It won't matter if every house in the US has a fiber 100Gig connection to the Internet, as it is designers will figure out a way to overload it to the point that it's worthless.
  
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  - No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades really cramps his style.
The broadband advantage... by Ianoo · 2004-09-12 05:18 · Score: 5, Insightful

It doesn't surprise me. Broadband really does change the way you use the Internet, and indeed the computer. No-longer do you have to dial up (or dialing up is automatic and takes seconds), the Internet is just "there" whenever you want to access information.

I have always used the Internet too much, but I definitely notice it has changed the way several of my friends and relations have used their computers.

Just being able to search for something on Google whenever you want, without worrying about people potentially trying to phone you or your minutes running out or your phone line getting hung up is a major boon to trying to write a document or even just read the news.
and why not? by tc3driver · 2004-09-12 05:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

it is getting increasingly inexpensive, faster, and more reliable than dial up...

... the down side, more people means more traffic, the pipes can only get so big, before there is no room left for all, and then there is the IP address problems that will come of it, there is hardly enough to go around now...

IPV6 that will help, but the costs of such a large protocol change will be daunting, to say the least... and what to do about those users that are still on win95/98...

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Re:Question... by phillymjs · 2004-09-12 05:27 · Score: 5, Insightful

Because we are supposed to be consumers of content, not producers.

Endusers running servers are verboten by the broadband services Joe Sixpack is most likely to use (like Comcast and Verizon), so Joe Sixpack is only given enough upstream bandwidth to send HTTP requests and whatnot.

~Philly
Re:Question... by exi1ed0ne · 2004-09-12 05:27 · Score: 3, Insightful

The size of an http request is very tiny compared to the webpage content you are requesting. The theory goes that you don't need to send a lot of data out, but you will get lots of data in. Also, it makes it frustrating to operate any services like mail or web. This way they can charge more for symetrical speeds.

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Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
Re:200 kbps uplink? by lphuberdeau · 2004-09-12 05:38 · Score: 2, Insightful

A while back, my ISP had 1 mbps down and 64kbps up, now it's around 3mbps down and 640kbps up. Since it's one of the largest ISP in Canada, that change sure is part of the statistics. I wonder how many other ISPs increased the upstream during this period.

One of the questions I ask myself is how 1mbps can be considered as not broadband, even if the upstream is lower.

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PHP Queb
DSL vs. Cable by rozz · 2004-09-12 05:40 · Score: 2, Insightful

In North America, Cable clearly dominates the broadband market ... Western Europe and the far East on the other had are overhelmingly betting on DSL.
Is this another stupid "war" like the old GSM vs. CDMA?
Or it's only a simple matter of who owns the connections - cable & media companies in US and Telcos elsewhere?

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"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1. Re:DSL vs. Cable by True+Grit · 2004-09-12 11:10 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Advantage:cable
  
  That depends on what you need, and how much money you're willing to spend for it. For cheapskates like me, who are still fine with land-line phones, and also not addicted to cable TV, the advantage goes to DSL.
  
  I chose 512kbps/128kbps DSL from a phone company (Sprint), even though its not true broadband and not the fastest available. My thinking was, since I already "had to have" local and long distance service, getting the whole package together effectively makes the DSL service ~30$ a month. Now, my net connection is always-on, doesn't tie up my phone, and is roughly ~9x faster but only ~12$ more than dial-up.
  
  Cable on the other hand doesn't offer me anything else I'm interested in. I dumped cable TV ~3 years ago, when they wanted 35$ for ~100 channels, of which ~80 I considered to be absolute junk, and almost half of what was left were broadcast channels I could get locally.
  
  who needs a landline phone?
  
  Well, since I'm not a big talker, and never considered instant convenient communication to be essential, I never bothered with cellphones since they are always more expensive than land line phone service.
  
  This perhaps may depend on who your local phone company is, but it goes both ways too. Adelphia is the only local cable company I have, and because of financial difficulty (bankruptcy) and mismanagement (being financially gutted by their former owner), Adelphia is milking their customers for every dollar it can get (to help it recover), making the phone company's package deal (local/long distance/DSL) very favorable (to me at least).
  
  Of course, I'd love to have 3mbps downstream, but 512kbps means apt-get update only takes about 80 seconds, and the following upgrade runs at 3MB/1min, instead of 1MB/3min. Now web pages are almost instantaneous, what took hours now take minutes, and since I'm not a heavy downloader (no movies or music), thats more than good enough for me. Most importantly, the net increase in my monthly costs is just $20. OC, YMMV.
Not Surprising by poofyhairguy82 · 2004-09-12 05:49 · Score: 2, Insightful

Broadband "fixes" the Internet for many people. It might shock some /.ers, but some people hate waiting for computers. In a world where your TV, dvd player, radio,ect. just instantly comes on and works, broadband allows the internet to do the same.
Recently my girlfriend started surfing big for the first time in her life when she got cable broadband. I asked her why she didn't use the internet back during dial-up days and she said "Well, it took so long to get to web pages; I always thought the Internet was broken! Its now like changing a channel on TV."

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Open Source Sushi
Not very surprising.. by baudilus · 2004-09-12 06:02 · Score: 2, Insightful

I think you can attribute this to more and more "package" deals that weren't available previously. For instance, here in the NY/NJ area, Optimum Online is offering a TV/Internet/telephone deal for $90 / month for a year (digital cable, internet, SIP phone) to users of any one or two of their services. That is a stellar deal in my book, considering that with optimum I am used to averaging 8.5 megabits down. I'm sure there are deals like this all over the place.

Coupled with that, take a look at the number of modem-friendly web pages out there - I would think that this number declines proportionately with the increase in broadband use.
This sounds quite reasonable... by Zx-man · 2004-09-12 06:21 · Score: 1, Insightful

...mostly due to one the major drawbacks of the modern computing:
Bloating in all of the ways possible, so the increase of the data size creates a need in increase of the amount of storage required for it, as well as the bandwidth for its transfer
Re:In other words... by DrEldarion · 2004-09-12 06:55 · Score: 3, Insightful

You joke, but many of the higher-profile sites are going more towards video than just pictures nowadays, and that just won't work with dialup. It's not rare to find sites with gigs upon gigs of downloadable videos.

...

or so I hear.
I haven't seen that by Trepidity · 2004-09-12 07:57 · Score: 3, Insightful

I first got broadband, in the form of a cablemodem, in 2000. It cost $40/month for 3 Mbps down, 384 kbps up. Now it costs $50/month for the same speed.

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1. Re:I haven't seen that by Saeger · 2004-09-12 10:16 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  And I first got broadband in the form of SDSL from Northpoint, in 1999. IIRC, it cost $180/mo for 784kbps/784kbps (and I got a northpoint friend give me a "free upgrade" to 1.5mbps/1.5mbps). When Northpoint went belly up about a year or so later, I switched to RoadRunner cable's 2mbps/256kbps for $40/mo. Another year later and Time warner increased the speed to 3mbps/384kbps at no extra cost to me.
  Overall, I'm getting more bang for my buck. Oh, and I download and upload multiple Gigs like a mofo, and not a peep from Timewarner in over 4 years. (NYC area.)
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