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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.
"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.
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
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.
"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.
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.