Slashdot Mirror
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 drones for the botnets out there. More DDOS attacks! More Spam! It's a Good Thing(tm).
stuff
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...
According to a documentary I saw recently, in the not too distant future the entire world will be hooked up to some sort of large interconnected network of humans from birth, controlled by some robots or something. I think in parts II and III of the film series, the documentary maker goes more in depth about how a small bunch of people get all cranky and get everyone else cut off from the network. Probably overused their bandwidth or something.
that BBC is reporting about the US trend. Whatever happened to the American analysts and news companies?
-ItsME
I'm just imagining the l33t scr1pt k1dd13s on their parents' new DSL connection and shuddering.... or perhaps it is the slowdown that the surge in content demand will cause. Oh well... maybe it does have a good side... after all, the people will be seeding movie torrents too :)
Ads? What ads?
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.
The Chinese are anti-social people and are prone to brutality. I think you are confusing them with the Germans, who are a reclusive, friendly people, rarely emerging from their home nation, and only then to spread love and goodwill.
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.
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
And Americans would -never- start a war on trumped-up pretense. No way.
....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.
"Video-on-demand" my ass.
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.
Call me crazy, but I think people could find some other ways to utilize the extra speed (VoIP, distributed/remote computing, and centralized network storage spring to mind). True, the Internet as currently structured does fine without multi-mbps connections to each and every home. Over time, however, the uses to which we put this little (D)ARPA-assigned school project will doubtless change and multiply, mandating an increase in throughput to satisfy these ends.
"We dwell within a silent country, beyond the reach of time and death" -Nothing Sophotech, The Golden Transcendence
Yeah but most of these features only work with POTS, and they had ISDN. After all when you've gotten used to 1sec dialup connection times it's hard to go back.
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.
...big business lobbyists didn't stop cities like Philadelphia from providing free public wireless access citywide. G(&* D(&** profiteers!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Yeah! That's EXACTLY what it amounts to - that or other's asses... :)
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Man, the slashdot Gods really knows how to take the thrill out of a man's accomplishments. Just yesterday, I was giddy with pride for having finally figured out how to get the modem-on-hold function working for my dial up. No I'm depressed and have lost all motivation to attempt the same thing with my Debian partition. Excuse me but I have to go sulk now.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
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.
Pathetic, and by your logic much less informed than USAians. Europeans should be ashamed.
Oh sure. Maybe broadband is cheaper some places. Or more people have it in other places. Big deal. Many Americans seem happy with modems.
1 Sweden 74.6 %
6,722,576
9,010,700
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
2 Hong Kong 72.5 %
4,878,713
6,727,900
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
3 United States 68.8 %
201,661,159
293,271,500
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
4 Iceland 66.6 %
195,000
292,800
ITU - Dec./03
5 Netherlands 66.5 %
10,806,328
16,254,900
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
6 Australia 65.9 %
13,359,821
20,275,700
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
7 Canada 64.2 %
20,450,000
31,846,900
C.I.Almanac - Dec/03
8 Switzerland 63.5 %
4,432,190
7,433,000
Nielsen//NR Aug./04
9 Denmark 62.5 %
3,375,850
5,397,600
Nielsen//NR June/02
10 Korea, (South) 62.4 %
30,670,000
49,131,700
KRNIC - July/04
What's so amazing about that? Carl Jung pointed out what we all subconsciously knew all along: People are a walking mass of contradictions (heavily paraphrased, I know, bear with me here). The ability to entertain two contradictatory thoughts at the same time is one of the main things that differentiates the human mind from a computer. I have a friend who gives forth eloquently and logically on any number of geopolitical/social topics, yet still harbors an irrational hatred for France (though I've managed to convince him to scale back his rantings to a mostly personal loathing for Jacques Chirac and his cronies).
"Stand not amaz'd," for such is the human condition.
"We dwell within a silent country, beyond the reach of time and death" -Nothing Sophotech, The Golden Transcendence
The trend was known throughout the year as well, but was never served as a statistic. This finally positively affects the way I (and many others) design sites, in terms of bandwidth.
My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
Yet some of these countries don't even have potable water. [bleeding heart]It is my opinion that we should concern ourselves with the quality of life in these unindustrialized nations before worrying about their connection speed.[/bleeding heart]
It's an article from BBC.
BBC = British Broadcasting Corporation = Great Britain.
From the article's perspective, it's talking about broadband usage over here in the US. But they are there. Get it? Good.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
That should be 9 million new connections this year, 32 million total.
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.
Back in the bad old days, you might be paying $60+ for a 512kbit/s cable modem service, plus equipment/set-up costs, while dialup ISPs usually hovered around the $15-20ish range for a month.
:P
Now, however, you can get broadband for much cheaper ($20/mo in some instances) while the quality of service has increased dramatically, while dialup's quality has held fast with only minor price drops. It only makes sense that people are shifting towards broadband; the only dialup I ever see used anymore by friends/acquaintances is NetZero and Juno because, well, you really can't beat free.
That's funny. Not flamebait. I only wish I could select which messages to metamoderate.
-gjr
100 percent broadband access... except here, we're still stuck with dialup. And I'm in the US. Yarrr..
I foresee using dial-up for years to come in my future..
So will broadband use drop by 30% after 4 months?
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
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.
...since the corporate media refuse to report on them.
The BBC however is hardly free of self-censorship, and its news is presented very much from the point of view of the cliques that run it.
The best news IMHO is dominated neither by governments nor corporations, but there's not a lot of that around these days, at least not on television or in dailies.
I live in Tokyo and I've got 24Mbps downstream DSL right now. However, I'm within 500 meters of the central office. The greater Tokyo area also account for about 30% of Japan's population in an incredibly densely populated area which makes it much easier to roll out service here.
Supposedly in the US, now that the Bells have reasserted themseles as monopoly players, speeds will start going up. I've seen many references to fiber to the home being on the horizon.
because 33% of all traffic is BitTorrent stuff, 12% of the increase is from people wanting to download torrents?
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
But how about the rest of the world? Especially unindustrialized nations. They'll be using dial-up for years to come.
Otherwise known as RURAL AMERICA. I shake my fists at my dial-up at least once a week. Just move you say? Try convincing the wife/kids. Besides, the other benefits of country living (less crime, aside from the occasional meth lab, and low traffic and virtually no people congestion) outweigh even broadband. But I'd still sell a testicle for a solid non-FAP'ped broadband access.
Right now, you can get 9-5Mbit ADSL for 15/month in most of the big/medium city.
//TODO: put sig here
Why was this modded Troll? Because of the comment about the Chinese? For fuck's sake, dude, read some history.
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
At least in my area, performance has been slowly degrading over the last few months.. I was the first to have broadband, having to wait forever for it to be available, as most here dont even know what a computer is..
The day after Christmas was dismal.. Felt like we were back on dialup most of the day..
Stupid kids with their stupid games.. Bandwidth wasters.. Nothing more.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The biggest problem with that is you need a specific service from the phone company that usually isn't available if DSL or cable modem isn't available. They don't even have caller ID where my parents live now. They're on satellite still and just got off of the 9600 baud dialup (thats as fast as the old phone lines would go). There is no call waiting or any other service that would make Modem-on-Hold work. The problem is that most people who live in an area where broadband is available forget that people still live in areas that don't have these luxuries. Unfortunately it leads to all kinds of people saying "what an idiot...you don't have broadband yet?" comments. I foresee many of these to come in this commentary below.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
The article is saying there are 32 Broadband connections in the US.. "more than 32 million broadband connections by the end of June 2004"
Doing some fuzzy math, for a country of 300 million people, that means 10% of the country is connected.. BUT WAIT!!
Connections are to HOMES, not to People, just like TV. There are roughly 95 million TV homes (maybe more these days). So 32 Homes with Broaband means roughly 1/3 of the country or about 100 million people (more than 1 person per home... + all those who "borrow" wireless service from their clueless neighbhors).
http://www.hawknest.com/
I think people are switching to broadband if they can get it because the price of the national ISP's for dialup are getting pretty expensive for what you get. EarthLink now costs US$22/month, and MSN and AOL are even more expensive for dial-up service.
As such, people realize that Comcast Hi-Speed Internet broadband at US$42.95/month isn't so bad, especially when you can download complex web pages in a few seconds and enjoy more or less stutter-free streaming audio and video. Besides, most new computers come with 100Base-T Ethernet RJ-45 connectors, so setting up for broadband is relatively easy.
If you really consider Fox News and CNN to be the best, most accurate information in the world, I truly pity you.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Huge jump in those with broadband Internet? No wonder I can't get any work done this holiday over my parents' cable modem. Stupid holiday downloaders.
Because of course, this guy's acquaintances MUST be a representative sample of the Finnish population.
Sean
Maybe the BBC is sticking to an obsolete business model? Where is it written that foreign correspondents and news anchors must work for the same employer? Wire services have existed for decades. We don't read the Associated Press newspaper or watch the Associated Press newscast, so why should the wonderful web of BBC correspondents only appear on a TV network owned by their employer? They don't and the world has another interesting slant on the news, one that is different than that paid for by American advertisers (and confusing mix of taxpayers, sponsors, and members in the case of PBS).
I think that currently the US news industry is suffering from a shortsighted tendency to save money by cutting out extensive networks of trusted overseas news sources. They reply too much on the press releases of people and organizations looking for free publicity. Although most bloggers would make lousy journalists, I expect that as the internet matures, the expensive network of company owned reporters will be replaced by independent reporters who are actually from the same culture that they report on.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
"During his 2004 re-election campaign, President George W Bush pledge to ensure that affordable high-speed net access would be available to all Americans by 2007."
The President hopes to have these new Internets online very, very soon. But first, certain rumors will have to be put down.
sig not found