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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).'"
Is that in the USA (and the UK) it seems that broadband is kinda-fast. Maybe maxing out at a few megabit/s.
Parts of the far east and scandinavia seem to have far faster connections already... yet in the west we are rolling out slow broadband services and haven't really got plans for higher speed ones.
This will restrict the possibilities for video on demand and similar services. Of course it's likely that comcast et al might want that...
that BBC is reporting about the US trend. Whatever happened to the American analysts and news companies?
-ItsME
Ok, this is a jump and it's surely not the ONLY reason, but I wonder how much the publicity from pirated movies/music has encouraged people to get broadband to try it? I knew many people that never even considered downloading movies online (or new of bit torrent) until the big MPAA pub over it. Now they are all pridefully exchanging the best torrent sites they have found for it.
This means several things. To start with, it makes perfect sense in conjunction with these news.
It also means that the US, despite all their assumptions, are far behind the rest of the world in matters of broandband. France, for instance, you can get a T1 line for values near 50$/month, similar thing in Sweden. Even in Portugal, which is easily in the tail of Europe in terms of broadband, it's now quite hard finding someone still not connected via DSL or Cable. In Estonia, it's in their constitution that having access to the internet is a human right. In Tawain, 2mbps connection is nearly free, and as common as electricity (you'd be hard pressed to find a house w/o connection).
My question for the conspiracy theorists, is this on purpose? We're all aware that an online population is much more likely to be better informed and free from the shackles of internal manipulation and mass media, by picking news from other sources. Is broadband adoption being purposefully slowed down? It's a humorous question of course, but it does bear to mind... why is a technological giant like the US so far behind in broadband, why are they rather investing in military networks instead of public ones? While at it, why is their power grid system so OLD and crumbling?
"I don't mind God, it's his fan club I can't stand!" E8
Naturally the various bells and cable cos love it when they can roll out broadband without any real capital investment.
Most people, like my parents, never saw the need for broadband, but now that they have 512k connections can't understand how they coped without them.
People won't want a faster connection until they've come to expect one, but presently that only includes those of us who've worked with networks in the acaedemic or corporate world.
At work i'll cancel a download that's under about 600kbytes/s and try to find a mirror - yet i remember when 3kbyte/s was revolutionary.
Still if company X says that a 1Mbit/s connection is blazingly fast broadband then 90% of people will eat it up and never disagree. So there's no incentive to do anything better - which is surely where the government should come in.
They happily build 10 lane highways, surely a good comm network is a natural extension of that.
A large portion of the US still doesn't have access to broadband at all, and it's not only confined to extreme rural areas. Hell, I live 15 miles from Lansing, Michigan and I can't get anything faster than 26,000bps dialup. It's not like we're the only house for miles either, the cable company just refuses to string out the lines another 8/10ths of a mile because of the cost. That extra mile would cover atleast 90-100 homes, most who are fed up with DirecTV.
Wasn't it just a few monthes ago when CmdrTaco posted an Ask Slashdot about him finally getting broadband? If I remember correctly, he lives only a few miles outside of Ann Arbor, MI, and he was inquiring about satilite and it's support of his Mac. Satilite is hardly an answer, it's extremely overpriced and slower than any other broadband solutions. I've looked at a few places and most places offer it for $45-$60/month with anywhere from $400-$600 in equipment and setup fees, and that's for only 400Kbps on the high end with a second of lag. Not to mention you have to sign a 2 year contract.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
Wow, everyone is quite the Cassandra today.
Compared to just a couple years ago I would say things are A LOT more secure for a variety of reasons:
Melissa.worm showed corporate america their security is terrible and now its rare for me to see a client running Exchange without Symatec or Trend Micro's realtime scanner.
The wireless/router fad puts everyone behind NAT, thus behind a firewall. The internet is chock full of articles on "how to open ports" because so many technophobes are behind firewalls but want to use P2P or some other app that requires port forwarding.
People are getting *less* ignorant. Its easy to sit upon your FreeBSD high horse and mock everyday users, its a lot harder to help them. And they have been helped. There's a technophile in every family. The number of articles in the media regarding spam, spyware, and viruses is non-trivial. The fact that I can say the word spyware to a stranger and not be asked what that is shows that the message is getting across.
Microsoft is seriously getting into the act. SP2 is godsend for the technophobes out there. Firewall on by default, better IE control, etc. Hell, they even recommend Ad Aware on their own site. Their aquisition of Giant can only mean good things in the long run.
That being said, the worst offenders in my experience are computer savvy teens who don't give a shit, not new users. They're savvy enough to get warez and also savvy enough to do that eventual re-install long after they;re so infected its hurting their download rates.
I've been doing some support for college students (for those who live in the dorm) and they're a lot more careful because they have data on there they need and have to put up with University policies regarding proper use. These skills translate over to the workplace pretty easily.
So yeah, its not perfect, but in my experience its getting better, not worse. Sorry, but the internet has yet to collapse because of new users. In fact, more users means more eventual power users and an eventual critical mass where everyone has someone to lean on when they need help with their PC.
Things expand to fill up the space they're given. If a site thinks you have more bandwidth, they'll tend to deliver more bits, even if you don't want those bits.
Albuquerque PC
What a crock of propaganda.
The United States is 3rd in total internet penetration rate (68.8%), only behind Sweden(74.6%) and Hong Kong(72.5%).France, Portugal, and Estonia, aren't even in the top 25.
Those stats can't be taken seriously. I live in Finland, and of all the people I know I can only think about a handful who don't use the Internet. I'd say that's maybe one percent of all the people I know. Those people are all over 70.
Pretty much everyone in Finland handles their banking transactions (paying bills etc) solely though the Internet. Physically going to the bank is _rare_. Many people have an Internet connection just for paying bills, but they do indeed use the Internet.
(Sidenote: I've handled two cheques in my whole life, everthing here is handled electronically with inter-bank connections.)
Now, If 99% of the people I know use the Internet, and the study says 50% of the people I know don't use the Internet I'm going to go with my gut. Sure, there's a hell of a large margin of error with a sample of a single person's expecience, but I find it impossible to believe the deviation could be 49% even if my own top-of-the-head approximations are way off.
.: Max Romantschuk
Compared to just a couple years ago I would say things are A LOT more secure....
With all those dire warning articles in the mainstream press, people ARE taking heed of the warnings about Internet security and are installing protection programs as fast as possible. For example, you don't need to pay for that added security: install ZoneAlarm and AVG Antivirus for free to provide real-time protection, and run something like Ad-Aware SE and SpyBot (both are free) once a day to clean out tracking cookies and adware/spyware. Also, people ARE installing patches to various operating systems more diligently, especially since the horrors of the Blaster and Sasser infections.