Slashdot Mirror
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..."
29% of broadband users needed to refresh Slashdot more rapidly so that they could obtain a first post.
I mean, if all you do is dial up for 5 minutes each day to download your email, I guess a 5 buck a month service suffices. But I imagine that in 15 years, such a meager usage would be almost unimaginable.
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
is that once you try it, you can not go back to dialup.
If you haven't had broadband yet and only dialup, upgrading doesn't seem necessary. But once you've experienced the speed of broadband and the convenience of not having to dial up and log in, you'll never want to go back.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
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
It's all a matter of priorities. I'll bet that of those people not willing to pay $25 or $30 for entry-level broadband, a good portion of them spend $50, $60, or more on cable or satellite TV.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
14.4k was for the rich, and we were lucky enough to even own a computer! Harrumph, these techie-wizbang whipper snappers...downloading everything in sight, always wanting things FASTER and FASTER!. Harrumph I say.
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...
This slashdot-related signature is a stub. You can help kihjin by expanding it.
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.
Homer Simpson: "Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that."
Old people.......have mod points too. Good luck.
Table-ized A.I.
Sites that work just fine at 56K:
The primary use of broadband is to deliver ads. At the consumer's expense. No wonder 30% of users don't want it.
Not everybody lives in the service area for PacBell DSL.
And not everybody is savvy or patient enough to get the $15/month plan.
I try to renew at $15/month , and the dumbass on the phone says I can only renew for $35/month. I call again, and I can renew for $25/month but only if it's the second tuesday of the month and my right foot wearing a shoe. What to non-techies do in this situation?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
The reason for the lackluster demand is that animated gifs make perfectly good porn. Most porn is just back and forth movements of the same kind over and over. Animated gifs can repeat the same 10 frames over and over for the same effect. What is needed is to transform people into a species that has more varied sexual movements, such as figure 8's that morph into W's, etc. Butterflies have the right idea; they do it in the air in a frenzied dizzy kind of sky dance (although JavaScript may be able to mimic this without lots of frames). As usual, the real problem is the damned humans. Until the marketing department figures this out, they will continue to drive Honda Civics.
Table-ized A.I.
Th scrt to usng dlup efctvly is to skp lttrs. Tngs ld fstr whn u skp lttrs.
Table-ized A.I.
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
Price was an issue until just recently. SBC/ATT dropped to $13, and Verizon dropped to $15/mo. That's less than large ISPs (Earthlink, MSN, AOL) are charging for dial-up, and only slightly more than most others (Netzero, Juno, etc) with crappy dial-up service and software.
The only excuse now is if you travel a lot, and need access all across the country.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Old people...
Maybe they don't want to pay $25.00 a month (Plus the FUSF fee, plus the taxes at $49.99/month, plus some sales tax for some equipment which you never used) to have the ability to browse an Internet full of advertisements.
Back in my day, a cup of coffee cost $0.50. Now it costs $2.50 at Starbucks and they burn the fucking beans. $2.50 for burnt coffee? And you get the pleasure of standing in line for 10 minutes, because all of the other coffee shops shut down.
"It's burnt coffee at Starbucks, let's be honest about it. If you get burnt coffee in a coffee shop, you call a cop. You say, "It's the bottom of the pot. I don't drink from the bottom of the pot. But when it's burnt at Starbucks, they say, "Oh, it's a blend. It's a blend." It's a special bean from Argentina....."
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Repeat, 2 years in the making.
Also: I don't know what all the bitching is about (from the old story): Even President Bush jumped into the fray last month, calling for affordable, universal high-speed access by 2007.
I mean he *CALLED* for it people, and it's just one year away.
TK
Yup. It should be cheap as hell and everywhere.
The U.S. is determined to make itself obsolete - and sooner rather than later! That's why the looting is so fast and furious these days. Eventually we'll end up just one more population of rioting people demanding economic parity like other third world labor countries are doing right now. Just watch how the U.S. becomes irrelevant during the next century thanks to our inability to innovate thanks to laws that favor the few against the many.
It's all about the price of labor, and driving that price down, down, down...
A lot of technology gets talked about on Slashdot is ultimately pinned to what some shmoe worker at Kwik-E-Mart can afford, and if s/he cannot afford it don't expect that technology to become ubiquitous.
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.
10% are not able to get broadband access in their area.
05% percent insist broadband is "too complicated".
05% aren't even sure why they don't have it..."
===
109% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Yes, many jobs will require Internet access. Many jobs today require Internet access. But are you seriously going to tell me that day laborers or fast food restaurant workers are going to need access to the Internet in order to do their jobs?
"How long will banking without the internet be reasonable?"
Probably for a very long time. Unless banks can find a way to print money over the Internet, ATMs and physical banks will need to continue to exist.
"When will doing your taxes without it become impractical?"
Its not that hard to fill out a W-2 form. And even with tax programs, you are still going to need to enter the same information. If your taxes are a bit more complex, those programs are very useful, but not everyone is going to need that.
"any more than I can really comprehend people who don't use ATMs."
Well that just means you are not very good at comprehending other people's lifestyles.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
NTT provides broadband access for a fraction of the price that we get it for in the U.S.
Maybe that has something to do with the fact that Japan was essentially reduced to mostly rubble 60 years ago while we in the U.S. deal with OSP that is both that age and has never been properly maintained.
But here is a good example of why most people don't get even DSL. I'll present two cases here, the first my own, the second that of a relative in the same state.
Verizon said that I was too far from the central office to get DSL. "That's funny" said I since I could basically throw rocks at the central office.
Did two go arounds on this until finally I got the bright idea to call repair and get them to do an MLT. Sure enough, MLT said I was less than half a mile from the CO. I asked repair to enter the distance into my customer record and then called Verizon DSL back. Lo and behold - I now qualified.
In my aunts case, the home had DSL before she bought it and the previous subscriber had the line disconnected. When my aunt tried to get DSL installed she was told by Verizon that they she was too far out. I told her to use the trick I'd discovered and sure enough, two weeks later she had here DSL.
I've since ditched Verizon entirely but this demonstrates that in the case of DSL, if you don't know how the system works, you're screwed.
I'm a consultant in central Illinois, USA. Once you're outside of Chicago with it's associated 'burbs, your options for broadband become pretty limited. If you're near Peoria, Springfield, Champaign, Decatur, or Kankakee, you have some options with DSL and cable broadband. Some of the small towns, populations > 200, also have cable, but it's typically only because some mom and pop cable company built it up and then. SBC offers DSL only within a couple of miles of town. There is a subdivision of more than 500 homes right outside of Peoria and Bartonville, both of which have DSL. Yet the subdivision doesn't. Until the cable provider brought in a couple of T-1's about 3 years ago, no options existed. Yet this is less than 3 miles as the crow flies from Bartonville. And there is a new switch and fiber (both less than 10 years old) running right along the road outside the subdivision. And we all know that SBC isn't readily doing any landline buildout for areas they "already cover." Verizon covers some of the towns in the region, like Canton. But guess what? You can't even get proper caller ID for your PBX from Verizon in that region. Antiquated equipment with no likelihood of change for a while. There are also numerous other telcos involved in the region, none of who provide services beyond basic voice grade lines if you're outside of town limits. Insight (ATT) provides high-speed services via cable, and they were doing build-outs in central Illinois, but they have a formula that they use to determine whether they're going to invest. They look for existing fiber, but will add as needed. However, more than 75% of the towns in the region don't fit their profile. If the town's population is less than 1,000, meaning a likely household count of less than 300, chances are you will never see cable. Insight even does a drive-though, counting satellite dishes if the numbers get close. If they see too many, forget it, they're not returning. Riverton has cable and DSL and is just 4 miles from the city limits of Springfield, the state capital. Yet if you live only a mile outside of Riverton, you have no broadband options. The list goes on. Effected population? Hundreds of thousands in Illinois alone. And they don't all have the option to "move to town for a better connection."