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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).'"
With all of the price drops in high speed internet service, it was inevitable that more would use it. Personally, I know people who don't need to have high speed internet service since all they do is e-mail and casually use their computers. Eventually, more and more will divulge into the computer scene, then upgrading from dialup to broadband once a computer is common in all households and a neccessity to everyone. Myself, I wouldn't be able to live without a computer for a few days, but most people are still traditional. Why is this even news? It's inevitable, more people are going to use it regardless.
....there has been a large jump in computers being turned into spam zombies, servers hosting warez, pr0n and other things, and malware installations.
This isn't flamebait, but I notice that a lot of the Joe Average-type of users don't know how to secure their machines. They are usually very ignorant about the Internet. The majority of them don't know what a firewall is, use a browser that resembles swiss cheese (cough*Internet Explorer*cough), and do other dangerous things such as going on any random site to download some spyware-infested game or opening attachments in Outlook.
Combine this ignorance about computers in general with a broadband connection, and they're an attacker's delight. With a broadband connection, most users wouldn't know that somebody is silently doing weird things with their computer, since their Internet connection is so fast, they wouldn't really notice a reduction in speed. Besides, broadband connections are always-on connections, further adding to the user's complete obliviousness to what's going on.
It's kind of sad, because all these users need is a firewall (preferably external), secure browser, and, most importantly, some education. However, the latter approach is really hard to accomplish, and in order for the users to find out about firewalls and secure browsers, they would need to be educated about them, anyways. Maybe we need a commercial that tells the public to install firewalls and install Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/insert-your-favorite-browser -here, and to be actively preventing malware and other nasties from being installed on the computer.
The main problem with slow broadband--stateside and elsewhere--is the transmission medium. Rollout of broadband to new areas often entails laying down hundreds of km of fibre, as many areas have nothing but Cu wire prior to this. Add to this that the two most prevalent broadband solutions still use Cu for the "Last Mile", and you have huge bottlenecking problems. To their credit, Verizon is trying to fix the problem, but any infrastructure change on this scale is going to take aeons.
Contrast this with S. Korea--the poster child for a wired society. Look back a measly few decades, and lo and behold, no telecom/cable infrastructure to speak of! By the time they started really getting serious about geting wired, fibre had become the Medium of Choice, so that's what they used.
Everywhere. In everything.Consequently, they get blisteringly fast internet connections, and are often puzzled or pitying when their US friends complain about slow downloads or quadruple-digit ping values. The US can have this kind of speed, and it will, but the time required to replace an existing network (or notwork, as may be the case ^_^) is several orders of magnitude greater than the requirement for installing an infrastructure into a virgin environment.
"We dwell within a silent country, beyond the reach of time and death" -Nothing Sophotech, The Golden Transcendence
"Video-on-demand" my ass.
They're too busy talking about Scott Peterson or the eating problems of that one Olsen twin. You know, the important stuff.
Albuquerque PC
I live about 2000 feet from a phone company switching station that's only a decade or so old but only in the past few months has DSL become available (at about the same time that the local cable TV franchise started making noises about offering VOIP).
My conspiracy theory is that everybody's switching to broadband because dialup on a Pentium II or better and 56K modem is worse than it was at 28K with a 486.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
To start with, I'm having a hard time understanding how was that "propaganda". I think you're confusing "increase in penetration rate" (which is what the article is all about) with "total penetration rate".
Moreover, you're confusing "broadband access" with "internet access". You're talking quantity, I'm talking quality. And just so you can see where I'm comming, those 75%ish where you're comparing the US and Sweden... in Sweden you'll be hard pressed to find a non-broadband access - you should give it some further thought.
Read the report U.S. a Generation Behind in High-Speed Broadband instead of just reading BBC news.
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
The way things are going, the BBC is becoming a major news force in the USA anyway. An awful lot of US public radio stations are carrying BBC World Service overnight (cheaper than NPR), you can get BBC World Service on XM and Sirius, and BBC World TV programming gets aired on local PBS stations. Sure there's BBC America but if the BBC got BBC World carried on more cable systems and on the satellite services then we'd see them referred to in the same vein as CNN, MSNBC, Fox...
... but then so am I...) b) you can get that pirate music easier and c) in a lot of cases it's cheaper than AOL and that second phone line, so why not go broadband, dump AOL and get that speed increase.
However, the BBC has advantages the US domestic networks don't, and that is an outsider's view. They aren't in the hands of politicians, and are non-commercial. Their interviewers are more straight and to the point, sometimes even confrontational (e.g. John Humphries, Jeremy Paxman...).
If the BBC were ever given funds to develop a proper US news service, I'm sure it would be successful - politicans couldn't criticize it for being left wing or right wing, and if someone like John Humphries ever got to interview President Bush (or anyone in the Bush Administration) I'm sure that would be a very interesting interview indeed. Don Rumsfeld for breakfast and Rice for lunch?
In any case, this is supposed to be about US uptake of broadband. My guesses as to why it's popular are a) you no longer have the World Wide Wait with dial up Internet (and Americans are impatient creatures
Mark.
"Sounds like the US and UK strategy is to squeeze as much as possible from our antiquated telephone and cable networks, and we'll worry about laying fiber some time later...."
FIOS *is* Fiber to the Premises
It's not a future promise, it's not "squeezing the telephone network". It's a new network based on fiber to your house, it's fast, and it's being deployed NOW. Verizon is investing 2.5 billion in deploying it through 2005.
Besides, what's wrong with copper and coax? ADSL2 offers 25Mbit speeds when used on good loops, and each QAM cable channel (there are at least 125) offers 40MBps of bandwidth.
"Fance, for instance, you can get a T1 line for values near 50$/month, similar thing in Sweden."
You can get 1.5MBit/1MBit DSL from Qwest for around $35 a month, including ISP.
They don't use T1s in Europe - it's a US standard, they use E1s.
There's no conspiracy. The facts are clear: the US government hasn't paid to put in the broadband infastructure. It's been the individual companies - Qwest, Verizon, Comcast and others - who have paid for the equipment and labor.
We don't have "super fast" access because no one gives a shit. 95% of Americans probably couldn't tell you what "bandwidth" was - nor would they care. The biggest problem facing broadband adoption is not infastructure or cost, it's the fact that people already have dial-up and they don't see any reason to change.
We have low broadband adoption for the same reason that we drive POS Chevys and eat absolute shit as food - we don't bother to demand a better product.
Now all we need in the US is services that are condusive to actually serving content instead of simply consuming it. I suppose the ridiculous asymmetry of broadband services in the US ought to be expected of a country raised by televisions.
I've got a broadband connection. It's 3Mbps downstream and 256Kbps upstream. While it is decidedly quicker than a 56k dial-up connection in either direction it is definitely not designed let me serve content at reasonable speeds. Many ports are also blocked at the cable company's head end so I can't use standard service ports (80, 21, etc). I also have to pay an obscene amount of money if I want a static IP address that I can point a DNS entry to.
Some people do have residential broadband that offers saner upstream bandwidth, no port blocking, and free static IPs. Unfortunately this is not the norm here. Most of us either have to pay for hosting or a "business" service package from our broadband provider. In either case we're paying a lot of money for services that ought to be provided for all broadband users.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
But the US is still behind compared to other nations, ranked 13th in the world by a UN telecoms body.
Because the US government refuses to invest in infrastructure. Congress believes the road to Internet growth is best left up to private companies.
I'm definately not for big government, but there are some things only goverment can do. The Internet is a bit like the federal highway system and entrusting its growth to the likes of Comcast and Verizon is a bad idea.
Actually this is not funny and i don't think it was intended to be funny, there are a lot of people without no proper education on the internet getting hooked on it these days. Im not thinking about the CS/IT level education they should be given, but some basic safety education which should be given to them...i would make it complimentary but let's stop chasing red herrings for a second, i would be very happy if they would at least offer it, offer basic safety education with a new internet subscription.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
> When your connection gets faster it becomes practical to mount disks on remote systems.
> I'm forced to do this sort of thing for work and it's pretty slow even when i'm only
> editing source files.
I don't know what kind of work environment you have, but I find it much faster to remote-X my Lucid Xemacs over an ssh connection that I do to mount the disks and edit them that way.
The added bonus is that I don't have to compile on my slow home boxen to test my changes.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?