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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).'"
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
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.
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.
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.