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FCC: Broadband Usage Has Tripled Since 2001
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."
A lot of people have 200+ kbps uplinks that are artificially capped in the realm of modem speeds by their ISPs. I wonder how many of these have been counted in this survey?
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I'm surprised it's been that slow. EVERYONE seems to have broadband now.
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t's an interesting thing. There's a huge difference between broadband and POTS (or even ISDN). It just changes the whole connected experience. More and more internet content is predicated on users having broadband access and is not accessible to us 56K'ers. Giant apps., huge patches, streaming video and all the rest of it are just not a possibility for a vast number of internet users in much of the world (probably the majority). In my country broadband is available in some places but is prohibitively expensive for private individuals. Two days (and considerable expense) to download a new kernel versus 20 minutes or so. It is really creating a two tier system with a 56K underclass - sort of a Two Nations scenario.
There is only so much bandwidth on a copper line. The split is made because most end consumers just downloaded content, with very little traffic needed to send HTTP requests, emails, or IMs. However, P2P makes the lopsidedness much more acute nowadays.
..........availability. What is the amount of households that actually have access to broadband, that previously didn't in 2001? I know availability has been a real kink in most people's plans to get high speed internet access.
-Randy
Doing my own math here:
So is it:
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
Verizon is launching a DSL service that is twice as fast as its current DSL offering, with downloads of up to 3 Mbps. story here
Especially because of this, the broadband wars should become interesting.
Hm, I get 1.5Mbps down, 128kbps up from Verizon DSL. Does this mean I don't have broadband?
No. You don't.
Somewhere along the line, the word "broadband" got a legal definition. Because of all the Peer-to-Peer stuff, though, most ISPs prefer to severely limit the upstream. This is why nearly all companies advertise their internet connections as "high-speed" rather than broadband now.
-Grym
Oh, I'm sorry. I guess one of you out there has no sense of humor. So, I'll explicate just a little bit.
As someone who installs broadband devices for a living, let me tell you what this "explosion" in broadband numbers means. Every day more and more people are getting on the Interweb for the very first time. They aren't doing much more than fucking up signal-to-noise ratios, when they do manage to interact. For the most part, they just want in on ebay or poker room or porn.
The Internet failed to be a wonderful, great, uplifting experience for humanity. Now, it's just another corporate shill in a never-ending line of shills.
Now, you may also mod this as bitter, off-topic and a troll. But it is true. And you all know it.
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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.
I disagree. Standard web stuff is expected to be pretty much "instant" with a "broadband" class connection, and its been that way for years, and if a standard website does not load fast, it would have to be of some pretty unique and desired content that cannot be found elsewhere for someone to wait for it.
Now transferring masive files, that is a different story. A download (or upload) is expected to take some time, and even with a fast connection, the transfer rate will vary according to the protocol of the transfer, the speed of all the internode hops, etc etc. If anyone consistantly gets downloads of over 1 mbit/s for all of thier downloads, please let me know what your internet connection is. Right now I have access from anything from a cable modem at home to Internet2 at work. The fastest transfers I get in real day to day life is about 3.5 MByte/s using scp (I could be CPU bound here), and that is more than fast enough for transfering gigs of data at a time. When I transfer large amounts of data, its ususally audio files, and I transfer about 1 Gig at a time which takes less than 5 minutes. Thats fast enough for me. I can transfer data faster than I can realistically process it. Meaning I could not burn that much data to CD in that time, or listen to it, or hell even finish reading all of the info about it.
I don't know anyone who still does dialup except my dad and he says its "fast enough" for him and its not worth paying the extra $20 a month for a faster connection.
The latest new DSL offering in Sweden was 26Mbps, and that came last summer.
The most common upgrade these days in Sweden is 10Mbit full duplex to 100Mbit full duplex.
When are you US guys going to realize you're being shafted? The phone companies have no interest in promoting broadband beyond the lowest rate the market will bearably tolerate; it threatens their existing cash cow.
I wonder how many users signed up for broadband particularly for Xbox Live. I've got several customers at the store where I work (we sell games) that discuss Xbox Live and how they're considering signing up for broadband particularly for this purpose.