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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 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.
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
....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.
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.
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
That should be 9 million new connections this year, 32 million total.
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
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.
...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.