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BBC Reports 38% Jump In U.S. Broadband Use
Sammy at Palm Addict writes "The BBC tells how broadband internet usage has soared over in the U.S. 'More and more Americans are joining the internet's fast lane, according to official figures. The number of people and business connected to broadband jumped by 38% in a year, said the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).'"
More households are begging for access to .torrent s of p0rn ... before the MPAA/RIAA screws them over!
What demands the 1 gigabit-per-second is real-time videos. Yet, the basic cable television already fulfills such a need.
Most Americans are social creatures. We enjoy watching videos with other people, not alone. Hence, the VHS player never did vanquish the movie theaters. Tickets for the theaters are as expensive as ever, and still the "gang" meets Friday night for a trip to the theater.
So, using the Internet to watch movies by yourself is really a solution to a problem that does not exist. A few geeks may want the gigabit-per-second feed for their pornography, but otherwise, there is little demand for such an speeds.
So, what is the utility of the Internet? The utility is information. At the tip of your fingers, you can access the best, most accurate information in the world. Consider Fox News, CNN, "Washington Post", "Wall Street Journal", etc. Of course, search engines like Yahoo! Search enable you to find the information you need to understand, say, the pancreatic cancer that afflicts a member of your family.
Getting this information is sufficiently easy and comfortable at 384K Baud.
By the same token, high-speed Internet has not reached a plateau in, say, China or Korea. The Chinese are anti-social people and are prone to brutality. So, watching videos alone is considered "fun". Chinese culture is vastly different from Western culture.
This statistic bolsters many people's claims that dial-up is long and dead. Combine this with a rumor I heard that AOL is planning to phase out all dial-up service, and we have 100 percent broadband access foreseeable in the near future.
But how about the rest of the world? Especially unindustrialized nations. They'll be using dial-up for years to come. If more software comes out directed at the industrialized broadband world, the narrowband world is pushed out, therefore increasing the gap between the First and Third World. If we can increase broadband access here, we should do so likewise in other countries.
I have a 40 mbps connection also here in Tokyo. You can get fiber from two providers and get 100 mbps both ways. Fiber will install for free and after that you pay 50 USD per month. I can't get 100mbps since my landlaw says no to get fiber into the house ;(
Lars