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We Don't Need No Stinkin' Broadband
Ant writes "eMarketer has an article on The Yankee Group's analysis on why some Americans aren't feeling the broadband love. It was based on Ipsos Public Affairs. 45% of Americans say it's simply too expensive. 30% say that they just don't want it. 14% say they feel dial-up is adequate for their needs. Less than 10% are not able to get broadband access in their area. Five percent insist broadband is "too complicated". Another 5% aren't even sure why they don't have it..."
You have to have a reason to require broadband. Websites load slowly with dialup, so that's not a convincing argument. Things like video blogs that use online recording through the browser don't work with dialup - while many people won't care about this, a new mom trying to send video of her kids to family members only to see choppy images with no audio may be convinced by such an argument. Some people won't have a killer app, won't upgrade, and - even though I make a living off of high speed networking - I can't say I blame them. Some people just don't need the newest technologies, and likely never will.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
I'm still on dial-up, as I have been for the last 8 years (at this address.) I see offers come and go, but they still boil down to an eventual rate of about $50/mo. I only need that speed now and then and it's hard to justify.
It's about the same with me as it has been with cell phones. I've had those 3 different times and always cancelled because I was shelling $35+/month and using the phone for less than 10 minutes a month. Only when seeking a new job or apartment do they seem genuinely necessary. I've got a pay-as-you-go plan now and I used about 20 minutes a month for each of December and January, so this is much more to my liking of ~$10/month. For service.
I'd like high speed for downloading Microsoft's bloated patches (why are these things always 15 MB? for a "few" fixes?) or the latest virus scan patterns (again, why are these things 5-10 MB?) Seems there's always a hell of a lot more than seems necessary, but I suppose developers of today didn't grow up trying to maximize 8K and could care less how much shit is in things as it's not their problem. For the most part, I get by and that's all I need.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yeah I noticed that too, but you need to realize that some of the percentages overlap. The article page shows two separate graphs. Unfortunately, the /. editor decided to include percentages from both...
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I'm from semi-rural Alaska (though I go to college in New England), and in my neck of the woods, it's usually cheaper to get broadband access. There are a couple of phone companies who service the area, and if you catch one of them at the right time with the right promotion, you can get DSL + new phone service, or cable + cable modem, at the same price as dial up, or maybe slightly more. My family did this, if only so that we could be online at any time without tying up the phone lines. That's what was the most painful about dial up, not being able to use the phone at the same time. Long download times are a pain, but can be delt with; missed phone calls cannot.
We recently got DSL access to my house, and as soon as the option was there took it, since they were only letting a few households from the area on at the time. However, now that I'm out of the house, I think the only good thing about my family having DSL is the phone issue: otherwise, we have a lot of bandwidth going unused. But at least when my dad "screws up the internet," I can call and walk him through getting it working without having to hang up every time he wants to check to make sure it works.
In Canada I get broadband and +70 TV channels for 80 looney Canadian dollars a month. Posters from other countries like Korea, Japan and some European countries have posted in the past about how, relative to U.S. rates, broadband cable is cheap in their respective countries.
So what's up south of the border?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
As someone who works for an ISP that offers both dialup and broadband services---
H A!:FW:RE:FW:" emails during their time at the computer.
98% of people who want or have broadband don't need it. They check their email twice a week and/or look at weather or news sites once in awhile.
75% of people who *have* broadband assume everyone else does and sends email with attached 150mb video files of their kids' snowball fight, with 200 accumulated addresses in the CC field. They also average to circulate about 130 "FW:FW:FW:RE:FW:FW:FUNNY!:FW:FW:FW:RE:FW:FW:RE:HA
100% of people who demand broadband don't want to pay for it. Either they forget or they never knew the days of $50/month or pay-per-minute dialup (at 14.4Kbps or less!). $40/month is the best we can offer. If we could offer it for less, we would, but all too often our customers get wined and dined by some $29/month special by the local cablemodem provider and jump ship. I point out in their offer that this rate is only going to last for 6 months, but they usually respond with "If they raise the rates, I'll just cancel and go somewhere else."
Fuckwits. I give up. I'm going to quit IT and open a restaurant.
do() || do_not();
Go ahead - try to send video of your newborn baby to your relatives across the country using 56k.
First step is using 56k to go to usps.com to look up shipping rates. Second step is using 56k to go to froogle.google.com to look up prices for DVD-R or DVD+R media. If it's that important, and getting broadband to your home would involve a $100,000 setup fee to move from the country to the city because of the real estate price difference, then mailing DVDs is cheaper than getting broadband to your home. If it works for AOL...
and non-internet options start getting really, really expensive.
What "non-internet options" are you talking about? And "really, really expensive" compared to what?
Huh?? This is modded insightful?
As others have pointed out ad blockers work with broadband too.
If you play computer games, watch videos, download music you generally find dialup isn't usable to grab some of those huge files. A 600Mb game update or a 70Meg video clip isn't going to be 50% ads, even when you consider all the clicking you might need to do to grab it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The normals don't want "broadband". Just like they don't want "cable". They want sports shows, movies, cooking shows, 24 hour news rotations. Cable is just a means to an end. They didn't want "the Internet", either, or even "the Web" - just email, porn, or whatever their personal favorite websites happen to be. When broadband is a necessary means to some end, some killer app, they'll want broadband.
Markets are driven by consumer demand, not by producer supply.
--
make install -not war
I know it's hard for the /. crowd to understand because network is typicaly more simple to jack into than dialup. It's this whole PPPoE thing sold by the likes of Earthlink and other ISPs or worse yet AOL Broadband that gives the impression of something rather complex that makes broadband so much so less attractive, esp AOL with slow DNS servers that make the net look like "the slug.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
The savings to companies and organizations that come from putting information on their web sites are huge. Printing costs a ton, even today. People at desks to talk to the public cost more. Actually keeping less-sold items in stock across the continent instead of just shipping them when wanted is incredibly expensive.
More and more companies will reach the point where it's almost impossible to get your business done without using the internet. How long will companies accept resumes on paper? How long will banking without the internet be reasonable? When will doing your taxes without it become impractical?
Even beyond that, in fifteen years most of our traditional communication systems will be on the net. Telephones and television will be run over the net whether you know it or not.
The net isn't a single medium like TV. It's more like electricity. I don't have a television, but I can't see how I'd run my life without a net connection. I'd have to go so many places to pick up pamphlets and forms, sit on hold for hours so much more often, order unusual items I'd like to buy at the store and wait a week for them to be delivered to that location...
The people who don't use the net at all are literally dying off. The people who do use it won't be able to comprehend the lifestyle of the small minority who still don't, any more than I can really comprehend people who don't use ATMs. The bigger and more capable the net gets, the less sense it makes to maintain a whole separate infrastructure just to support the holdouts.
The closest match to this situation today would be Japan. Can you get by in Japan without a cell phone? Maybe, but I doubt the average Japanese person would have any idea how. That's "unimaginability" for you. They couldn't imagine it.
Come to Australia, relive those old memories :)
As an idea our primary telco just happily announced that they can now provide broadband to allmost 16% of all Australian homes.
...
A while back I was in a bit of a financial crunch and opted to ditch my cable TV subscription in order to keep my broadband connection. When the crunch ended, I never really felt compelled to start the service back up since I realized that I didn't miss it all that much. Currently my TV is sitting in a closet next to a pair of rabbit ears, waiting for the next time I have guests that can't cope without their little glowing friend.
My God! It's full of eval()'s.
crazy wacko Luddites who live in cabins in Montana.
I'll have you know that in my (former) corner of Montana, the crazy wackos who live in cabins can get some pretty descent deals on dsl, thanks to Interbel haveing the foresight to install 200 miles of fiber.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
My parents fought broadband for years and years even though the accessed some work related stuff through the interenet (subdivision maps, deeds, and some other documents from the local court house). The never could see why there was any reason to pay 55 dollars a month plus, because of the wiring in the house not being available, a wireless access point and card.
:) They can not stand to use dialup any more - it's amusing to hear dad telling someone to go look at some funny video he found.
I told them time after time that the map that took them 15 minutes to load would be nearly instant (comcast has 8mbit down here). One day thier modem finally kicked the bucket and I needed a new wireless switch/card so I made them a deal - purchase the one I want, try broadband for a month and if you do not like it I will buy the card/switch. At the end of the first day my father ask "Why didn't we ever use this before - I saved over an hour of time in *one* day!". Of course, I had to be that smart ass son and pointed out I've said that for about two years now
For them "price" would have been listed as a reason, though mostly because telling them how much faster doesn't make sense - for most it has to be something used and internally felt. I suspect that, as you said, the largest portion of those that say they don't need it would suddenly not be able to live without once they used it some. I've never driven a Ferrari and can't really imagine how it feels, many have never used broadband and can't raelly comprehend how much faster things happen.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Do you really think a big-name like SBC or Comcast gives a rats arse about you if anyone requested to see your browsing records? How do you know they aren't already in cohoots with GW to spy on you?
At least with a local dialup ISP there's more work involved to spy on you. And customers are much more valuable to a mom-n-pop establishment.
Why should my money go to a big-name duopoly for net access? If broadband was available at every mon-n-pop ISP we could have real choice and a better chance of security.
Well for one you are still talking about 10x to 6x the speed of a dial up connection, so there are plenty of things that are still quite fast comparatively for you. My Grandfather recently decided since his shows kept referring him to a website for additional information on things (especially the nightly news) he wanted to get into using it, so my Father and I have been getting him set up with a dial up account. Every time my dad walks him through how to access some website, he comes back home to tell me just how sssllllooooowwwlly dial up loads pages compared to our dsl. We also have the "slow dsl" package for the area. 768Kbps as opposed to the "fast dsl" 3Mbps we could have instead.
I could still get my Daily Show fix on dial up, but it would be more effort to do so. I would have to sit around waiting far longer for each clip to buffer. There are plenty of free music sites around these days, many of them far more legit than the napster of old. I can grab a sample track of an unknown independant artist that wants the exposure and listen to it immediately deciding whether or not I want to go ahead and download the whole album set, or move on to the next artist. Movie and game trailers, game demos, viral videos. All possible on dial up, but I used to actually have to consider whether or not it was worth the online time investment and pick and choose which ones I got, now if I have the slightest interest in it and time to view it, I grab it. My ping in online games has never been lower or more stable. Those are the main focuses of MY use of broadband.
Well, that and the porn.
The big difference between the US and most of the rest of the world (okay, EVERYPLACE I CAN THINK OF, but I don't want to make generalizations), is that in the US we have free local calling. That means that if you want to call your ISP downtown, you can be on 24/7 and it doesn't cost you a dime more on your phone bill.
This is not the case elsewhere.
This means that if you, for example, were living in Japan in 2000-2002 (as I was then, and as I am again now), your phone bill with dialup was $200/mo for enjoying the kind of net access you had in the US--and even then, that was disconnecting anytime you thought you'd be reading a page for a long time. When ADSL hit your area (okay, MY area), it represented a HUGE savings. Suddenly you could stay on all the time like you wanted for the low low fee of $50/mo.
So widespread broadband penetration here (Japan), and likely a lot of other places in the world, is due to the fact that it represents a HUGE cost savings over dialup. The fact that it's faster is a side benefit (and before anyone starts oohing and ahhing about my "24Mbps" connection--I get 3Mbps on a good day--it's all BS marketing, which the great NTT tech geeks to whom one can actually COMMUNICATE with about things of a technical nature, like their product, are all too ready to eye-rollingly admit).
So instead of saying "The US is behind in broadband," we probably should say "The US is WAY ahead in phone service!" Same thing with cellphones. The fact that in the US one can TALK on a cellphone and still eat every month is because Americans demand cheap voice communications and are used to getting it.
Keeping your OS (at least Windows or Linux) up to date and patched pretty much *requires* broadband. I think that's the reason there are a lot of vulnerable machines out there.
I have asked several people who are still on dial-up how they keep their systems up to date, and every one of them has said that they "turned that damn update thing off!" because it was so annoying and made it impossible to do anything useful.
Unless you are geeky enough to care about patching and manage your limited dial-up bandwidth, you are not going to update over a dial-up.
When I was still on dial-up, I compared the cost of keeping a Debian system up to date over the dial-up to the cost of DSL, and it was a wash. That's what motivated me to get broadband, it cost the same as far as keeping my system updated, and I could use it for the rest of the month at no extra cost.
But most folks don't care about staying updated, so they see no need for broadband.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
If you've had access to a connection with real bandwidth - something like the 1Gbit connections you get in good university computer labs - then you know what the internet can really be like: every loads instantly, videos play with no buffering or delay, 10Mb downloads take a couple of seconds, latency for gaming hovers around 20ms, and so on. But if all you've had is Earthlink or AOL DSL (which is NOT always on, but instead basically dials up via PPPOE on demand), then you've never really experienced broadband at all.
A-Bomb
Keep in mind that the "keep it expensive" mindset in America's utilities corporations also means that the telcos are going to raise the price on dialup, through 2 means: periodic pushes to increase the costs (base price or fee) of basic service, and mergers of dialup companies producing a steadily more monopolistic environment.
A basic phone in the US is probably $20. On top of that, basic dialup is $15. DSL is starting to dip down to $35. And around here, the cost of basic phone service is going to go up again, perhaps a relatively large increase this time. For myself, I'll have to strongly consider making the change just to avoid paying more money.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]