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Dial-Up Users "Don't Want Broadband"
Barence writes "The majority of dial-up Internet users say they don't want to upgrade their connection to broadband, according to a new study in the US. The Pew Internet & American Life research found that 62% of dial-up users had no interest in upgrading to a high-speed connection." (CNN is carrying the AP's story on the study, too.)
We must convert the dial-up heathens!
Send more broadband missionaries!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
In other news, 81% of Americans on Dial-up would like to switch to high speed internet if the price was right...
Nothing to see here... Move along...
Interestingly, the percentage of dial-up users lacking interest in high-speed connections was identical to the minimum age at which such disinterest is first seen.
These people are probably your mothers and fathers who aren't particularly into computers. If they're just checking e-mail and maybe a little web surfing on a Pentium II with 128MB of memory, it's hard to argue that they should pay $50 a month for broadband.
I hated paying $50 a month for cable internet even though I used the hell out of it. It just doesn't seem like a reasonable price.
My grandmother refuses to upgrade to broadband even though it's an extra $5/mo because she's used it at my house and it loads too fast. She says that her internet at home is "perfect Grandma speed", and us "young-uns with fresh brains can handle the zip of that fast stuff."
What the fuck is the internet?
*survey results may very +-2%. Results collect from the 3 people still on dialup.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
When they can get AOL 15 Optimized for Dialup! With internet SPEEDBOOST technology! Its better than Dialup, its AOL!
And its only 26.95/mo!
"You'd think just the fact that it frees up their phone line would be enough but noooo. Apparently nobody ever calls them either."
You mean the little round thing with the red light and cord isn't for talking into?
Pew Internet & American Life sounds like a fake business. You should only listen to results from the firm of OMGPEWPEWPEW.
Majority my ass, when did 1/5th become a majority.
Quite the misleading headline.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I don't know if it'll still connect (though I suspect it would...), but by the time I was in high school, broadband had so permeated my neighborhood that my dialup provider didn't even bother deactivating inactive accounts. Three years after we switched to broadband, we could still use our dialup service when the cable was down.
Dialup was good enough back in the day. Couldn't -- and still can't -- beat $4.95/mo when 90% of all you needed to do is check your email once a day, which pretty much describes the internet habits of my parents. If they needed anything bandwidth intensive, they'd usually just take care of it at work.
I think the only reason my parents switched to broadband was because I would spend hours tying up the phoneline when I was IMing my friends.
I can see where people look at the $10/month they pay for dialup ($120 a year) and compare it to the cost of broadband; cable internet in my area is at least $45/month ($540 a year, or add $10/month on top if you don't have cable TV service!) so they would pay an extra $420 a year to have the same access, but faster.. Come to think of it, thats kind of depressing that I pay that much a year for internet! If I was living on a low fixed income, cable and internet would be among the lowest priorities. Some of you will laugh at me, and call me a phony geek, but have you ever gone a week eating only 1 cup of nooldes a day because you couldn't afford to eat? I have, it changes your priorities pretty quickly!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
...until one of his kids started sending videos of his grandchildren to him, along with the high MP pictures. Add in the gallery (Menalto's Gallery) that I run that hosts lots of family pictures. He also likes to view videos from humoron and other sites of that nature, and dialup just wasn't working for him.
I tried to convince him for at least a couple years that he should get cable or DSL, but he refused to because he either didn't want to pay the up-front costs, or he hated the company (or a combination). He finally got a taste of higher-than-dialup speed at a friends house, bit the bullet, and finally signed up for himself.
Many of these people are probably in the same boat. They just simply don't know what they are missing out on, and that's fine. That means they're either out in their community, or watching TV, etc. I just have a feeling that many of these folks would actually put a higher speed connection to use if they were introduced to all the stuff they could be using it for.
I know for a fact that one of the driving features for my father getting his DSL was that he was able to talk to my deployed brother via the internet far more cheaply than phone calls were. I wonder how many of that 62% have deployed children/family members that they'd like to be able to talk to more often?
bork bork bork!
Some people don't have a choice. I live in a rural aria where a lot of people can't get broadband. Just last year I was stuck with just dial up and believe me I was checking all providers weekly to see when I could upgrade.
... I'm not too surprised.
The most important difference, as far as I'm concerned is not in speed, but in the always-on nature of the connection.
For a long time my (80-something) parents were quite happy with dial-up. And they basically didn't use the Net. To access the Internet they had to run a phone extension lead across the room. They explained they didn't use the Internet much, and I simply said, "and you wouldn't use electricity much if every time you needed to turn on a light you had to go out to the garage, start up a generator and then run a cable in through the window".
In the end they simply decided that they didn't want to be left behind by the times. They got wireless, I set them up with a Mac (yes, I know but the Dock is a great thing it you only ever need 4 applications) and they never looked back. They're Skyping, Googling, the works.
Exactly how you sell the way that the online experience changes when you are always on is slightly problematic, but it's key. People liek my parents really didn't care if the Web page opened twice as fast.
The few dial-up users I knew a few years ago didn't realize how big the difference was. They assumed that if it took 2 minutes to get a page on dial-up, it would be one minute or 30 seconds on high-speed internet. They equated high-speed internet to upgrading a computer. It's prettier and faster, but it is really the same thing. And they were patient.
That changed when they saw my laptop. Sometimes I would click a link and the page would load and they didn't even register that it happened. dial-up -vs- high-speed is like reading a book through a telescope a mile away -vs- reading it up close. And once you go there you can never go back. So I suspect most of those dial-up users who are left just have never seen the alternative.
My grandmother still fights me when I suggest that she get DSL. It's available to her for $15, but she prefers to pay $12 for the less-expensive dial-up connection -- and another $23 for the phone line on which she uses it.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I have never met someone who said I don't want more goodness for the same price. If your local dial-up provider said, hey we will give you broadband speeds for no extra cost tomorrow... I would be willing to bet that most would jump on it!
The only "advantage" that dial-up offers over broadband is the flexability of providers.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
If the ISPs in the UK had sold broadband as a speed upgrade I'd still be on dial-up too. The fact is lots of internet users don't need to download things quickly. 56k is more than adequate for email, it's practically overkill for SSH and it's bearable for light web surfing. There really isn't any reason to upgrade if that's all you do. Even the "always on" factor is really just a speed advantage.
The reason I bought into broadband was primarily reliability and the fact that it doesn't tie up your phone line. Having a second line in the UK is actually pretty unusual so anyone calling when you're dialled up gets an engaged tone. It's really reliability that killed dial-up for me though. I live a fair distance from my telephone exchange and rarely got a continual connection for more than an hour at a time. Consequently broadband was a necessity.
If you live in an area with reliable connections and a cheap second line then dial up is perfectly alright. Why pay more to upgrade to something you don't need? That's just throwing money away.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Most people don't need it anyway. And 1/2 that think they do really don't.
If we could dump all the extra garbage on most webpages, we could conserve a lot of bandwidth as it is.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've been sticking with dial-up service because high speed Internet's too much money for me. It's an added monthly fee that I just don't need. I can make do with dial-up. Turn off graphics and Flash and most web pages load just fine on a 56K dial-up connection. I just download patches for my Mac while I'm at work. I don't have a cell phone or cable TV either. I think I was just raised frugally.
"So yeah, dumb people have dialup so naturally dumb people wouldn't want broadband cuz dialup works just fine "
Frustrated with your dialup connection I see...
Not everyone downloads gigabytes of porn all day.
People that just read their mail and dink around on a webpage or tow don't need broadband.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not everyone needs to download Terabytes of porn and torrents on a daily basis.
Nor do they need to be gouged by a faceless corporation for filtered/packet reset/404 redirected Internet lite.
Frankly, I'd be OK with a lower speed connection, for a lower price, too. Say, 768kbps down for $15 a month would work just fine for me at home. Instead I pay $45 a month for 6mbps that I don't really need.
they also like flagellation
What a bunch of nerds!!!
Whale
And it wasn't that long ago that we did everything over dialup. Even expensive things like ISDN were just 2 64k channels. Barely better than dial-up.
And we managed to communicate, download binaries, mp3s, game, pass through uucp and email on uunet and such on pep modems, ISDN, and slower links.
To this day, about the only thing that crushes dialup are DVD downloads, and some dev apps and games that have become as big as DVDs.
Its not just about speed but availability. Sometimes you just want to check the weather but if it takes 2 minutes just to connect you just won't use it.
Just stop sending them AOL disks...
Depends on the variety of dial-up. When I go visit my mother in law out in the country, the only thing available is dial-up. Not just regular dial-up, but real country dial-up. It connects at around 26 kbps, when you're lucky. And then there's dropped packets, latency, disconnections. Not a usuable experience at all. I find it painful to check my web-email via squirrel-mail. Browsing the actual internet, on sites like slashdot, is a complete no-go. Even with images turned off. If you're talking full 56 K connections, it's pretty tollerable. But country dial-up isn't anything most people would choose to use.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
And I don't want to drive a porsche.
These people must not be downloading porn or (legit???) MP3's :-)
You mean the little round thing with the red light and cord isn't for talking into?
If they have dialup their mice have balls.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Verizon DSL is widely available in the South, a region where a lot of people could, on the surface, make the argument that they don't have the money for it. Well, problem is, basic DSL service costs not a whole lot more than dialup if you go through Verizon. We pay about $30 a month for it. From a cost/benefit perspective, it would be incredibly stupid for my wife and I to save maybe $10/month by sacrificing about 175kb/sec of bandwidth.
... and I still use dial-up, and not because I'm stupid or don't realize the many benefits of a broadband connection.
I just can't bring myself to pay $55 a month (price + fees + taxes) to the frikkin' thieves that are collectively known as Comcrap for a 12megabit connection that'll only get to 2 or 3 megabits ON A GOOD DAY.
So, in summary : (1) if I pay for 12Mbs, that's what I expect to get - none of that "you're a node on a network sharing bandwidth with other users" bullsh*t, and I don't care if "that's how the technology works, sir" ... give me what you promised or it's "bait-and-switch", which is agaist the law in these-here parts; (2) Comcrap isn't the only broadband ISP in town, just the least evil of all the choices, which is really, really sad; (3) with gas at $4.25+ a gallon and the price of EVERYTHING going through the roof, exactly where am I supposed to get $55 a month ... I don't crap $100 bills, you know (though, hey, it'd be a messy way to make money, but I could live with it).
It's the same phenomenon that leaves me shaking my head every time they interview some laid-off Detroit autoworker who says something like "This is what I've done my whole life. What am I going to do now?" The obvious questions would be "Good Lord man, you didn't see this coming?" and "Why didn't you get some training or find a field with a brighter future in the last few decades?" Sometimes you just get used to doing something one way, and are lethargic about changing.
You CAN teach an old dog new tricks, you just have to kick him in the ass sometimes to get him out of his rut.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
56Kbs should be enough for anyone.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I agree in some respects, but content keeps becoming more and more bandwidth intensive. Flash-based ads seem to almost be the norm now.
"If they have dialup their mice have balls."
My mice are female you insensitive clod!
BTW, first post!
My parents (well, my 67-year-old father, really) are the same. Dialup is $10 per month, ADSL and Cable around $35. Before taxes, that's a savings of around $300 per year. Over the five years I've had broadband and he's stuck with dialup, he's saved nearly $1700, after taxes.
Where I live, your choices are $20 / month for dial-up, or $40 / month for 512Kbs/128kbs DSL. Cable internet (or TV) is unavailable. I use the connection at the coffee shop in town :)
Learn about Photography Basics.
More than even the speed most of the time what I most appreciate about broadband is its always on nature. For a long time with dial-up I actually had 2 phone lines, one for voice and one for data. Even so, connecting the modem took time of not already on-line for an impulse checking out of a web-page. Now I just open my browser whenever.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Grandma is still paying by the minute.
B
No one needs broadband, just like 640k ought to be enough for everyone.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
Most of my (non tech-savvy) friends don't care if their machine is botted, so long as it plays GTA x okay. I have to explain (usually one-on-one) why they're being harmed, even if they never see a slowdown on their desktop or have to deal with law enforcement. I have to explain why letting spambots run on their boxes is bad, even if they never check their own e-mail (and thus never see spam).
Good luck explaining to Grandma and Grandpa why they should pony up an extra thirty-odd dollars per month or more just to get their e-mail a little faster and with one or two less mouse clicks. Incidentally, has anybody here considered that people who are satisfied with dialup are doing the rest of us a favor? Likely as not, they're not sophisticated users and are the ones most likely to be running infected systems - best to relegate them to the list of "connects occasionally for limited uses". My greatest nightmare is already coming true - millions of desktops running Windows with inadequate protection persistently connected to the internet via a high-speed connection.
Speaking as a dial-up user in an area of Kansas where broadband is not an option, I'd say that you're asking the wrong people here. (Note: Satellite Internet is a bad idea.)
It's a series of tubes.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
In other news, 81% of Americans on Dial-up would like to switch to high speed internet if the price was right...
Or, you know, if there were actually any high-speed internet services available in the area.
Where can't one get a T1 line?
My parents used to be in this category. "We don't NEED broadband -- it's already plenty fast enough for us at it is!" Then they tried it, now they love it.
Ah, the trusty Thinkpad. Long live the Clitmouse!
because the high speed net isn't really doing anything for the majority of people except separating them from their money.
Look, my grand parents and my parents to a similar degree are from a more responsible generation. They didn't burden themselves down with so many monthlies that marketing gurus have dreamed up to separate us from our money. I can't count the number of people I know who scrape by but refuse to acknowledge how they drain their income relentlessly through monthlies. Its only $1 dollar a day! Its only 1.49 a day! Its just $100 a month.
Sheesh. These same people wonder why I can drive and own a new car when I want it. They don't understand the magic of being able to buy something I want when I want it for CASH. I don't look at each month as a routine of $30 here, $50 there, and $100 there, and having to do with X minus a whole lot of Ys.
For the most part with current offerings all high speed internet does is satisfy our impatience. There really isn't that much different to the net for many of us that wasn't there a few years ago. A lot people justify it by "well I might want to do X" and such. Words to make a marketer's ears perk and for them salivate over.
Hell if anything this survey tells me there are many Americans with a real life. Call them hicks, backwards trolls, whatever, I know many do just so they can justify their spending money like it comes from trees. It certainly makes it easier to pass these people off as ignorant but at the end of day who is happier?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Good grief, $12/mo? Even AOL charges less these days!
Don't believe me?
http://free.aol.com/thenewaol/plan_choice.adp?partner=daol
And most places you only get that lovely $15/mo DSL if you pay for the $23/mo phone line... Naked DSL has a tendency of being a bit more costly.
So yeah, dumb people have dialup so naturally dumb people wouldn't want broadband cuz dialup works just fine *rolls eyes*
What's the saying? If it ain't broke, don't fix it? Why pay extra if all you use it for is occasionally checking email. My parents have dialup at home, but both have broadband at work - anything they need "fast" internet for, they do at work.
62% of people find the internet incredibly frustrating to use.
We must convert the dial-up heathens
Why should I change? My dialup connection works fine so long as noone picks up th# $% @#$#%)G$%$#^NO CARRIER
We've flattened their fingers
We branded their buns
Nothing is working
Send in the nuns!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
19/2kbps is fast enough for everyone, noone should need anything more. who cares if it takes an hour to download 6 megs. i do not want to be faster! i know its cheaper, and more stable, and embarrassingly slow, but i don't want better! i know cause some telemarketer called me and i told em!
i bet that pew company is made up of verizon comcast and sprint.
I don't throughput, I mean the actual modem-connection speed.
300bps here.
I know not _everyone_ has an unsecured Wi-Fi network in their vicinity, but I've saved...
60(mths) * $50 = $3000 ...over the course of college, more money for beer and hookers!
I was on $15/768 down with Time Warner for quite awhile. Normal surfing and even skype worked quite nicely on it. YouTube was a bit slow downloading sometimes, but no biggie. Now I'm back up to 1.5mbps for like $25. Figured I would try it to see if there was much of a difference. Might as well just go back...
Dialup just does not support botting, so it is better to leave them on dialup.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
...where I live, which is a horse farm in rural central Ontario, Canada. I do have my broadband though in the form of satellite access. For this, I bought equipment that cost over $1,000 and I pay over $100/month for 1Mbps down/256kbps up. The thing is I need it for my Internet consulting business and it is my only option currently. If kind of sucks also, due to the 550msec speed-of-light latency.
How many of those dial up users are facing the same dilemma? I know for a fact, for example, that in central Vermont there is no cable/xDSL available. I have heard that there are spots within 20 miles of the Golden Gate Bridge where there is no true broadband available. Never mind $50/month, how many dial-up users would be willing to pay $1,000 plus $100 per month (3 year contract) for broadband? I know, I know, TFA said 14% indicated no availability. This figure seems a bit low.
On a fortunate note, now that 802.11g bridges have advanced I may well have my true broadband soon. But to do it, I'm going to have to put up 2 eighty foot antennas, one here and one in town 5 miles away. It's going to cost me about $10,000. How's that for broadband being a costly luxury?
Oh, I'm definitely not a fan of flash at all. I find it preposterous whenever I have to wait an extra 30 seconds for a page to load because the flash is still loading... and I'm on a 6Mbps cable connection!
Then again, my days of dialup were back in high school - almost 6 years ago.
The reasoning here doesn't make sense - price? I don't know about the rest of the Nation but in my area DSL service is about $25. Unless those dial-up users are getting it for free , "price" shouldn't really be the issue.
Jessica
Their slow-life tortoises ads may have backfired on them. :-)
It's because they don't watch porn. If they watched porn, they'd switch to broadband in an instant.
I dated a guy who had two teenage boys (he was divorced with half-time custody). He works at a national lab, so it's not like he doesn't know what high-speed internet access is like, AND he certainly has the money to shell out for it. The reason he kept dial-up at home was 2-fold. 1) He could get all the large-size content at work (videos, pictures, etc) and 2) he could control his children's online time a lot better and not be tube addicts. The younger one especially is a bit of a gamer, and the father didn't want him to play for hours and hours. He was of the opinion that his kids should be doing more real-world activity, and if they wanted/needed high-speed, they could easily get it at their mom's house.
After my cable company introduced me to RST, I don't need 6meg either.
Anyone else miss the days where you could go make a cup of coffee while awaiting the interminable loading that accompanied nubile photography? My favourite was the glorious sound of connecting to the rest of the world though. Reminds me of that time I put my cat through the paper shredder.
*They* don't want it *now*, but that does not imply that they, or the people near them, may want it now or in the future.
My cycnic-meter tells me that this survey is going to be used to keep prices high in under-wired areas by suggesting that there's not enough demand to expand operations.
If there's affordable access, peoples' habits and preference change.
Any quick check in a bilogy book will tell you what humans need.
Food , water, shelter. ( and sometimes componionship).
All other material things are tools by which the others are met. Why should it suprise people that a fast internet connection just isn't a priority for people who already have all those needs adequatly met.
The next things down the line are conviences. They are cool , but your not going to compromise your ability to get the other for them unless you suffer from some kind of illness.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Just me and my chickens, god love em.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The dial-up users are obviously the only ones going to heaven because they must never visit porn sites and must never download music, video or software.
Might I suggest a persuasive line?
"Happy Birthday, Grandma"
From this day forth, text-only websites will not be tolerated! These die hard dial up users are slowing the progression of high speed connectivity options by voting with their dollars for slow technology instead of voting with their dollars for a faster technology!
I'm going to make all of my webpages have 1000+ images... we'll see how much those dialup users stick around! MUWAHWAHWAH!
I've been on dial-up for 8 years now. I'm 6 miles away from the nearest cable, too far from a box to get dsl (or so they claim...), too far out for cell tower internet, and not about to pay dish prices for the speed they offer.
So I deal with dial up. The internet just isn't worth the money to pay 4 to 6 times what I do now for only twice the speed on average.
I agree. I use 768kbps at home. It's fast enough. I don't really notice a difference between it and the T line at work. But it's miles away from dial-up. I think most of the people in TFA aren't aware that they can get 768kbps for less than dial-up in most areas.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
My sister used to be happy with dial-up. She used it for years, arguing that all she ever did was just check Web pages, and it didn't make sense for her to get an expensive high speed connection.
Then she moved, got a cable modem, and discovered the wonder of streaming media.
She feels very silly about it now.
And you probably don't even see those 6mbps, even under load.
Most sites don't upstream that speed, and P2P traffic is starting to get capped. :(
I have dial-up, even though the local telco offers DSL. I'm not switching. I won't do any more business with the local telco than I must (basic land-line service). Dial-up used to be OK, typical dial-up. By coincidence, then the local telco started offering DSL, the dial-up started having major problems. The problems have continued for over a year. It takes, on average about 10 minutes to get a connection to the dial-up ISP, the telco wire-taps the line and sabotages the connection to the ISP. I expect to take 20 minutes to an hour to get a reliable connection. Downloading patches is difficult. In addition, the terms and conditions of the DSL offering (which I actually read) are that the telco still gets paid even when they provide no service at all. I've talked to the telco, the Pennsylvania Attorney General and the BBB. Nothing has helped so far. I see no reason to switch. As the telco successfully wiretaps my phone connection and sabotages my current service, and the DSL t&c that insist on being paid despite providing no service, then it is reasonable to expect that the telco will provide as close to no service as possible. Thus there is no inducement to switch to faux-broadband.
Note this quote from the CNN article:
Twenty-four percent of rural dial-up users say they would get broadband if it becomes available, compared with 11 percent for suburbanites and 3 percent for city dwellers.
Kind of obvious, but it pretty clearly shows that there are groups for whom availability is an issue, and among those groups, the adoption rate would be higher.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
One elderly family member with a dial-up connection.
Another elderly family member with fast connection paid through the rent, and a digital camera.
Add in the $23 per month for the extra phone line that I mentioned, and those savings drop to $120 total. That's part of what frustrates me so much about it.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
As a newly-committed member of "TractorLand" where, while the house is provisioned with fiber optic, no broadband alternatives from Ameritech are invisioned, I've seen this too.
Only a few options are left for the out-of-town crowd: Satellite, Cellular, and Wifi. All are expensive if you're not near the higher-populated folks where you can get DSL. And guess what: 80% of dialup users are there. So it's $80/mo for satellite after all the rebates and such, 70$/mo for wireless (A kinda wifi that they use here in southern Indiana) and $100/mo for cellular as long as you can get the reception...and for people in TractorTown, that's usually bad.
All these alternatives use a telephone most of these people already have, plus a mere $10-$20/mo.
Not to mention, if they've never been ON broadband, they don't see the point in it.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
There is *nothing* special about dial-up users that makes them more or less prone to attack. Nothing, nada, zip. It's an IP connection just like broadband with the limitation of 33.6 Kbps and 56Kbps down. Period.
And no, having a modem attached to your computer does not mean anyone can dial-in. You need to have software running that will 1) answer the phone and 2) enable the modem to make the connection. The problem is that people would put remote control software on their computers which would answer the phone by design, and therein lies the problem.
I was poor in my 20s. I became frugal. Most of my computer use at home was just reading email and reading the web. Dial-up was mostly fine for that.
I switched after having gotten pissed off with the 3rd local phone company I tried. Apparently in the 21st century nobody has the technology to accurately bill people.
I figured out that if I dumped my phone company, dumped my dialup service, got a cable connection for the internet, and used VOIP I would only be paying about $5 - $10 more a month with the new combination of services.
This reminds me of trying to convince people to get TiVo or any DVR. They always used to say, "I already have a VCR, I can tape programs." You can argue all you want, even show them the product, but it just doesn't resonate with them that it would be useful.
Until they eventually break down and buy it and realize they can't live without it.
That's exactly what I think is happening here.
She has an extra phone line for her dial-up access. She has two lines into the house when she really only needs one.
And if she wants more phone lines for calling purposes, she can go with Vonage or a similar VoIP provider.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I'll throw some options out I haven't seen yet.
Some of these rural places are on Dialup because the major providers don't bother to carry a line out there. If the customer *has* the money, they can try a satellite connection, though those are a little shaky in stormy weather.
I was a cell-luddite for many years; I'm not an always-on guy, so I basically chucked my phone in the car for calling the tow service.
Once I hunkered down to change providers and buy a real phone ( ditched Sprint, went to AT&T, got a Tilt) the phone question came up. I went for a Dry-Loop DSL- Internet only! This really is pretty cheap.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Seriously.. If I have a week off of work, I don't log on to the net. If I do log on, its only to get directions somewhere. The only reason I actually have broadband is because I have no use for a landline phone, and I hate the dialup providers.
Linux suppot for dialup is next to nil. Yes it's because of those winmodems, but you'd think a couple of the common chipsets would be reverse engineered or something could be done like ndiswrapper.
I mention this cause I have a friend who got a machine with vista and it runs fairly slow, I was going to set him up with linux, but realized he uses a winmodem for dialup. So that blew that idea.
Quoting from the actual Pew Internet study (page 4):
Non-broadband users cite a number of reasons for not using the service
â" including availability, price, and lack of interest.
ô 62% of dial-up users say they are not interested in giving up their current connection .
for broadband.
When asked specifically what it would take them to get them to switch to broadband:
ô 35% of dial-up users say that the price of broadband service would have to fall.
ô 19% of dial-up users said nothing would convince them to get broadband.
ô 14% of dial-up users â" and 24% of dial-up users in rural America â" say that
broadband service would have to become available where they live.
So in other words, most (81%) dialup users _do_ want broadband but either can't afford it or don't even have the option. Saying they "don't want it" because of this is like saying starving people don't want to eat because the price of food is too high or there's not enough food to go around--it's just false.
This is an issue of supply and demand. The demand is obviously there, but people's incomes are not high enough. This is evidenced by the finding in the same study that poor people's broadband adoption has stagnated while that of the wealthier has continued to rise.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the essence of a paternalistic (and condescending) view, that's especially unwelcome (and dangerous), when shared by members of the government.
Shoo, shoo, shoo. Go away from whence you came and let the grown ups make their own decisions.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Actually, I've always associated dial-up with what you refer to as "real country dial-up." My parents (and 4 mooching brothers) have dial-up that never, ever climbs higher than 26.4K, and usually resides at 24K. It doesn't occur to me that dial up can (and is supposed to) actually go 56K. (Thanks for reminding me.)
But, that's what you get when you're on the last mile of copper coming from a mechanical PBX that was state-of-the-art in 1954. Anything more than Gmail and CraigsList is annoyingly slow.
I don't know who they surveyed, every single person i know with Dial-Up hates it and wants a better connection. The only thing holding them back is our poor lack of Infrastructure deployment. Most of them live within a 1/4 mile of range for DSL or Cable but the companies wont extend it because of the cost to build it.
Sadly, the bot-herders are mostly incompetent programmers, so I have had to disinfect computers on 33.6 lines.
One moron even tried to set up a gay porn distribution site via rootkit - on a 33K line!! I had fun with that one, though, because the owner is very macho.
"Hey, man, when did you start puttin' from the rough?"
"What?"
"Well, there's all this gay porno in these hidden folders... so I just assumed..."
"WHAT?"
"Not that there's anything _wrong_ with that..."
(pandemonium ensues, until I finally can't keep a straight face anymore)
Excluding video functions and extensive use of the image function, Google is a good example of something that really only needs what I would now dub "millebandwidth" or "microbandwidth". The work those people do is just amazing. Sure, you're latency might be elevated, but it really doesn't make that much of a difference.
And on the video ads, I find them totally obnoxious. I know someone's gotta pay the bills, but come on!
Not everyone with dial-up has a dedicated phone line for it. For people who are online so often or receive so many calls that voicemail isn't really up to the task, you have a point, but I suspect most dial-up users don't fit that description.
It's called DSL.
I can't get true broadband here b/c AT&T doesn't want to install enough DSLAMs for the population in rural areas. I'm stuck with craptastic wildblue for "broadband" with a 17GB cap. 17GB can be pulled on 56k dialup in a 30 day period with absolutely no problems. Not to mention when you use more than 70% of your bandwidth they consider it "abuse" of their policy and throttle your connection. Even before then, 20% of the packets are dropped and single-file downloads > 120MB are throttled asympotically.
Thankfully I have ISDN available for VPN and gaming. It's 128kbit, but has pings as low as 16ms since there is no signal conversion or long distance first hop.
Nobody really wants "broadband" as it exists now in some areas - a service costing $90/month or more for $10.00 in service.
just tell them www.youporn.com
then they subscribe for broadband
There are certain technologies that just aren't compelling until you've actually experienced them, and had a chance to explore the possibilities they give you.
DVRs would be a prime example. Nobody realizes what a difference timeshifting with a season pass makes, until they use one. It converted me from a non-watcher to a fairly avid TV fan, since my primary block was scheduling.
Broadband is another. My parents didn't understand why it was compelling either, until I finally more or less browbeat them into getting a connection. -Now- they get it, and wouldn't go back to dialup for the world.
Once you have it, the value proposition becomes pretty obvious: always on, internet being easily available to all computers in the house, a -lot- faster, more types of websites available, being able to effectively use web-apps, not having to worry about missing emergency calls from relatives (no matter how you configure the modem, sometimes the call-waiting beep doesn't disconnect it) and so on.
I'm not saying these techs are right for everyone. I am saying that in many ways, they're transcendent, and you can't make a good judgment about them until you've actually experienced them.
I've certainly heard a few people saying the are the 'Slowskys' when it comes to the internet. They like it slow. I'll tell you, that Comcast comercial did more to keep people in the slow lane. Reminds me of internet for country folk: http://txc.net.au/~mapie/HillTech.jpg
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Good enough? Addict? I'm sorry, I don't want to sound like a dick, but you clearly aren't much of a tech person. Let me ask you, when was the last time you downloaded a service pack or tried to use SVN on dialup? It's hell.
But, I agree 100% that it's good enough for most people. But not everyone is most people.
You didn't specify that it was extra so don't get all snippy with the italics there chief.
Winmodems are indeed a pain when not using Windows.
Until rather recently I was on dial-up, and ended up getting this dial-up modem. It works like most routers/modems; you connect your machines to it via Ethernet and control it via its internal web server, so any OS that has a web browser can use it. Dialing out and hanging up can be automated by URL parameters sent to its web page, so with a tiny bit of programming you can make a command-line modem control program. My Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows, and Linux machines all work very well with it.
If you're on dial-up, the $50 or so for such a modem is well worth it if you're interested in using non-Windows OSes.
I read Slashdot via telegraph.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
I am on dial-up for a number of reasons (both chosen and situational) that I need not go into here. Several posts cry "well, what do you do when you need to download software or patches or (fill in the blank) -- doesn't it take, like, forever?" No, not forever, but sometimes a few hours depending on the size of the file. So what? I can still get and receive e-mail or do simple browsing (checking news headlines, posting on Slashdot, etc.) without too much slowdown of the download. And if there is no pressing need to do those things, then I start the download and (**SHUDDER**) step away from the computer and go read a book, or cook a nice meal, or take a walk in the fresh air, or any number of other activities that, believe it or not, actually provide one pleasure and satisfaction without a keyboard and monitor. If I could download the same file in 2 minutes, I'd then probably be tempted to spend those next few hours doing even more web surfing and never seeing the sun. I consider slow downloads a nice forced excuse to spend a little time interacting with reality, and I think I'm healthier in all respects because of it.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
"So, would you like to trade your existing internet connection for a shiny connection that does exactly the same thing, only a little faster and costs five times as much?"
It's amazing how many people don't seem to think that that's a great deal.
Step 1: Get their neighbor to switch
Step 2: Get their neighbor to brag to them about how much better his internet is
Step 3: Person migrates, brags to another neighbor about how much better his internet is
Go to step 1. Repeat.
GMail mobile actually works respectably over dial-up. I do however find the actual gmail way too slow.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
In a lot of cases that might be right but saying someone should have dialup over broadband is like saying it's ok to eat your own testicles.
Secondly pandering to these people only encourages companies to not roll broadband out all over the US and that will severely limit people in the near future if not now.
Dialup will be really cool when movies, music, games, etc cease to be on physical media.
I find it humorous with the talk about prices like $20 a month for dial up vs $50 a month for broadband. I remember when you had to pay for access BY THE HOUR!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
My mother-in-law still uses dial-up and has no interest in broadband. She uses her computer for email and for pulling photos off her camera and printing them. Being on a fixed income, why should she spend more money for bandwidth she doesn't need?
You're not a luddite if you decline to buy something you don't need.
I can see where ISPs wouldn't want to provide dial-up anymore, but until broadband approaches parity, there's no reason to switch. (Rates vary wildly in different geographical areas, but for a given area, dial-up is almost always cheaper than broadband.)
Not to mention, being on broadband makes you more of a target as your machine tends to be on the net with the same IP address for longer periods of time. Us geeks know how to set up the router and machines so we don't (usually) get hacked, but grandmas who are only interested in email are unlikely to have this expertise.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I'd really like a broadband connection, but they didn't ask me because according to their definitions I already have one. But my alleged 3 Mbit DSL connection actually never goes above 2.4Mbit.
the essence of a paternalistic (and condescending) view
It is appropriate to be paternalistic when speaking to little children or dial-up users who think they don't need broadband.
The parties who are upset about the lack of broadband adoption are the advertisers and their customers. Unobtrusive text ads aren't sufficient for their purposes and even static banner ads are slow to download on dial-up, so it reduces their effectiveness. They want full-blown video and rich media that starts playing right away, and they need consumers to be able to register their messages before they can decide to turn their eyes away. Advertising is what drives the computing economy today.
Good enough? Addict? I'm sorry, I don't want to sound like a dick, but you clearly aren't much of a tech person. Let me ask you, when was the last time you downloaded a service pack or tried to use SVN on dialup? It's hell.
As a "tech" person, I don't need to download "service packs". As a user of OSS and not a coder of OSS, SVN is not important to myself. By comparing ISP speed to "techiness", it is not a dick you sound like, but an ignoramus. Without a doubt, some tech people will need high speed and some tech people will have no need for it. In my experience, it takes more tech skill to work with dial-up. Most users can't stand it because the flash/java/video crap is too hard for them to turn off.
This didn't have users test both services and ask them which one they "wanted"/preferred more.
This is 100% about money.
Foreign countries get broadband so much cheaper than we do on faster networks. I understand on several cases the network infrastructure was upgraded to greatest tech by their government so they don't have to pay much to their ISPs for using state owned fast pipes.
Seriously if we had the same rates/service other countries did NO ONE would choose to save the few extra dollars for dial-up, but we don't and you can save 40 dollars easily by choosing dial-up per month.
So like everyone else has stated it makes no SENSE for a lot of people in the US to have broadband, where as in other counties it doesn't make sense not to :P
This is a pretty bad report IMHO
I've been sticking with dial-up service because high speed Internet's too much money for me.
Yeah, but what high speed Internet were free? You'd sign up, right?
TFA is arguing that some people, given that bargain, would stay on dial-up; it's not an economic issue.
IMHO, that just proves the study is flawed.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Dial-Up Users "Don't Want Broadband"
and vice versa!
A place for everything - everything in its place. Such a happy, tidy universe!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Buy an external modem they are like $5 these days.
Linux suppot for dialup is next to nil. Yes it's because of those winmodems, but you'd think a couple of the common chipsets would be reverse engineered or something could be done like ndiswrapper.
There's nothing to reverse-engineer. It would be a complete signal-processing application from the ground up.
The reason winmodems are cheap is because there's nobody home. All the interesting stuff is done in software on your machine, where in a real modem, it's done using the modem's processor and firmware.
We live in an area where the only high-speed connection available to us is a Verizon cellular device.
* Satellite? No clear view of the southern sky
* Cable? Comcast says there aren't enough people in our area to justify the cost of running a line up our road -- despite the fact that our house is only 700 feet from a road that does have cable and we've offered to pay the $1000 for installation.
* DSL? 400 feet too far from the CO
* FIOS? See DSL, and Verizon is too busy upgrading everyone who has cable and DSL (as if they need even faster access) to get around to us country folk who have pretty much no other options
Would we pay for broadband at whatever price they were willing to charge? Absolutely -- but we can't get them to want to charge us. Before getting the cell service in November, it took my husband 2 hours every week to pay our bills online using the dial-up connection. Now it only takes 15 or so minutes.... except when our connection degrades to 100Kbps because of clouds or rain.
When we moved out here, I made an appointment for Comcast to transfer our cable service. It wasn't until moving day that they realized that they don't actually offer service to our house. Oooops. Every now and then, I check their website -- it continues to tell me that cable is available at my address despite the fact that it really isn't.
I gave up on checking Verizon's FIOS installation schedule because I know that hell will freeze over and have private 99Tbps connections to every tortured soul before FIOS makes out to our area.
--Insert catchy
Hardware modems exist and work quite well in linux. You can even still buy them. PCI or external RS232 (the horrors!). Your statement should read "Linux support for winmodems is next to nil." And that is true, because they are worthless pieces of shit.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
You forgot to list people wanting to:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Merely placing emphasis to make a point clear does not make one "snippy."
I thought the implication in my original post was clear that it was a phone line for internet use. Apparently, I was mistaken.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Honestly, I can't stand to even wait for a page to load on dial-up. And if someone sends me an attachment in email on dial-up... Not to mention it's easlier to update your computer (multiple computers in my case) etc.
I justify the cost of broadband mostly in time-savings.
Why not look at data from most any other country on dialup usage when broadband is available? This would give you some real data..
But instead there is a study which the results could be tainted/tuned to make people feel good about current broadband deployment.
Most areas in Canada have dial up alternatives(You need to not live in the boondocks where there is no broadband because your the only person living for 5 square miles or your hours away from a urban centere) for 12-15$ a month (Its usually about 128K service which ends up being 3-4 times faster (who actually ever gets a 56K connection dial up.. Its pretty rare if ever)
Not to mention they never asked these people why they would never change no matter what.. They could have atleast asked them if they would agree to the statement.. "Change is the Devil and I wont have any part of it".. or "I am too caught up forgetting about Evolution and Spreading the word about Intelligent Design to figure out broadband"
Its likely this study was done so that the Big Broadband players have something to tout about showing people "Facts" about how good they are doing so they arn't mandated to roll out more broadband.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
My uncle fell into this category. For years he would happily log into his ISP, check his stocks, read emails, the usual operations. Time after time, I explained that for just about the same price he could have a MUCH faster Internet. He would constantly reply with "it's ok, I'm patient and this works." Usually, I would retort this by saying that his patients was admirable and a good thing, but simply not necessary.
Until one day he moved to a new community which had all the houses pre-setup with cable modems.
In fact, at the new community, broadband was cheaper since it was just "part of the deal."
Since then, I haven't heard the end of "how much faster his computer is now." He absolutely loves it and says he will never go back to dial-up.
Realistically, I think most broadband holdouts fit into this description. Hesitant to change, content and generally patient with the shortcoming they have. But if they had the opportunity to try broadband for an extended period of time, I think most reasonable people would agree it's just better.
Great job! You insulted me and then agreed with my post! Troll harder next time.
Basic AT&T DSL is $19.99/month not that much more that dial-up. Other DSL providers have a basic DSL setup that is 384KBPS or 512KBPS which is way more than the old dial-up users need but cost less than that $22 AOL dial-up account that most of them have. In fact AOL will work with the DSL company to offer AOL access and software through the DSL and keep their email and web sites.
It is when you need the 1.5MBPS or higher speeds that you pay a higher price for.
I should note that a lot of dial-up customers still use Windows 95/98/ME systems and some form of WINMODEM and lack the basic Ethernet card needed for most broadband connections. A lot of broadband services no longer give that free Ethernet NIC, but people can buy them for $35 or under and install them themselves if they knew how. Just that the average person doesn't know how to open up their computer and stick in a card to upgrade it even if their lives depended on it.
Also Cable and Satellite companies offer broadband as part of a package deal to make things more affordable and so do local phone companies as well. So we can rule out that it isn't affordable, because it is affordable.
Most POTS systems only get like 33KBPS even if they support 56KBPS protocols due to line noise, as they are forced to connect at lower speeds.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I've got the first post on this thread!!
Broadband isn't that big a deal. Dial up is plenty fast for my purposes.
Have gnu, will travel.
Besides, I get all my pr0n surfing done at work!
Back at the uni, we had one really old comp, running Win3.1 and it had the bare minimum mem to boot. It was so slow, it had lag in the command line.
This one old man insisted on using that computer for all his lessons because, "..this one doesn't get away from me like the rest of them."
He did well on the lessons, he just took his time doing it.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
What this basically means is that 62% of dial up users are ignorant. They aren't mentally ill, stupid, or dumb asses, they're just uneducated and don't understand what "broadband" really is. Some of the reasons they think they don't want broadband (I use the term think because any educated persons should want something faster than dial up) are as follows: 1: They're paying somewhere along the lines of 10-20 dollars a month for dial up and see no reason they should pay more for Internet access 2: Broadband confuses them. They've used dial up forever and don't understand any other way to access the Internet. 3: A complete lack of knowledge of bandwidth, transfer rates, or data size. The biggest problem is that most of them really don't understand just how much faster and more convenient it is. They don't necessarily need 10 Mbps downstream, especially if they're only browsing web sites and sending/receiving e-mails, but 56 Kbps (and you don't even get that, depending on the condition some people can't connect any faster than about 28 Kbps) is not enough for today's web and even e-mails. This people that "think" they don't want broadband actually do want it, but they don't need any more than about 256 Kbps up/down. That would be perfect for them, it's enough bandwidth to quickly send and receive pictures in e-mails and even the occasional video clip (not streaming of course). And more than enough to browse most any well put together web site. I thought I should mention this as well; when I say 62% of dial up users are ignorant, I don't mean that literally. I know for a fact that some of them are actually very educated people, geeks even, but they actually don't need more than dial up because they most likely don't browse the web at all, or very very seldom. It kind of seams odd that a geek wouldn't care about broadband, but it's not far fetched to say that they exist and really just don't care. The people I'm talking about are the typical computer user that doesn't even understand what a web browser is, and can only use a computer because they have certain routines burned into their brain, but if an unfamiliar window comes out of no where, they'll have no idea what it is, how to get rid of it, or where it came from...those types of users are very likely to be the majority of that 62%.
That sounds like an interesting project actually. Hell once it's done you could even use your sound card as a modem.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The problem is that broadband is like indoor toilets. I'm sure that there really were a few people that honest to goodness liked truding out into the snow to take a crap into a hole, but I would bet that there were a lot more people that just didn't want change. I have no doubt that there were people making comments about how they already have an outhouse, so they don't need a fancy smancy indoor toilet. Most of those people just didn't understand the benefit.
I suspect that the same situation applies for most of those dial-up users. The only two rational reason to not want broadband instead of dialup that they travel a lot to places that have telephones, but no other internet. That is becoming rarer and rarer.
Maybe if someone would start selling a DSL modem that would pause and play noise from a speaker for 30 seconds before allowing data through, and would choke the connection down to 56k, we could get the hold outs on to broadband. If we named the DSL modem "dial-up", no one would be the wiser.
Other easy ways to save money 1. Switch to basic cable and saved a bundle 2. Use prepaid cellular 3. Buy generics 4. Buy late model low mileage used cars 5. Use Credit Unions instead of banks 6. Make Coffee instead of Starbucks 7. Pack lunch instead of eating out
Certainly not my parents. When you call them you get a busy signal when dad's 'using the internet.'
Thats like saying: Why would I want that crisp, clear, digital download when I've got this perfectly good 8 track sitting right here?
We kind of have this in the US, but it still seems like the market for this isn't really tapped. . .
It seems to me that a good solution for a lot of the people who currently use modems, who might like a bit faster connection where they could talk while being on the internet, but don't need 'broadband' per se, would be ideal customers for something like 128 down / 64 up DSL, at about the same cost per month as current dialup.
I mean, sure, I guess there's no reason people can't continue to use dialup, but even low-speed DSL (which I set my parents up with as a cheap, but slightly faster alternative than dialup), but if price is the primary concern for people, I don't see why telcos can't sell such a low-speed DSL service super cheap. It would hardly cost them anything, since they already have the DSLAMs setup, not being used, and the actual bandwidth such users use would be relatively minimal.
Added bonus: People say that having users on dialup helps limit the harm that a bot can do on such a computer. With an always on connection which doesn't interfere with the users' telephone usage, even if it's slow, Microsoft Update can just download OS updates, and the latest Microsoft Defender (or whatever their anti-spamware software is called) during the night while they aren't using the computer, if the users leave the PC on.
In truth, the same people who use dialup probably shut their computers off when they aren't actively using them anyhow. That's not bad either - saves energy, but the point is, if we want people getting the updates for their computers, even slow DSL is better than dialup, because it would still be faster than dialup, and would be on the whole time their computer is turned on, so the update *will* eventually complete downloading.
The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
AT&T offers naked DSL from $19.99/mo.
They call it DSL Direct
FairTax baby!
If you want text only. Get with the times, people! Dial-up is slow, impractical, and a waste of money. Think you're saving money with it? HA! Jokes on you. You have to pay approximately $50 a month for a landline, plus for the ISP itself. DSL can usually be had for around $40 a month, and doesn't tie up a land line (if you use one of those any more.) It's even horrible from an economic standpoint. It's like buying one apple for $5 or a ten pound bag of apples for $10. The bag costs more, but you get like 20 apples. In the case of dialup vs. broadband, it's worse. At market prices, it'd be like paying $60 for one apple from the above example.
those unpatched systems don't need much bandwidth to send lots of two line text-only spam.
Automatic Updates downloads patches in the background.
Automatic Updates downloads service packs in the background
"We'll get there when we get there." The service works just fine whether you have dial-up or broadband.
This is not headline news.
If you have the patience of a ten year old, you can order Windows XP Service Pack 3 on CD-ROM from Microsoft for $3.99. The CD-ROM is currently available in nineteen languages and dialects.
That's just being dumb. For starters meat isn't unhealthy. Excessive portions might be unhealthy but that is different.
Secondly most of those things won't hold you back in society. Drugs can hold you back but again it comes down to excess and nature will take care of those with little to no self control soon enough.
We don't offer every sort of phone system or electrical system that has ever been around. The whole infrastructure gets upgraded and for good reason. The internet is a utility as well and should be left to hold people back just because some people are happy with something that's outdated or because companies don't want to spend the money rolling out broadband.
Every city, town and village has some people that want broadband. Should they go without just because half the town doesn't want it? No and it's still logical to say people don't don't want broadband don't know what they're missing out on and more importantly what they will be missing out on in the future.
Guns, yoga and mixed marriages won't stop you from using software, watching movies or listening to music but that is the way the internet is heading and that means those people can't participate fully in society and that can potentially harm their education and chances at a decent future.
Even Amish people use phones and probably the internet but if we said their religion doesn't allow it and didn't roll phones out into Amish areas then they'd be worse off and the fact they don't use those items as much as us is why their society is becoming increasingly inbred and dying off.
That is what ignoring technological advances can do to a group. Meat and beer will not.
Plus having the telcos upgrade everyone to broadband doesn't mean they can't use their broadband the same way they used their dial-up so there is no actual changing of their habits unlike banning alcohol, meat or a certain type of car.
My parents' computer is stilling running SP1 since there's just no way to download over 70 MB of data over a 26.8 kbps line (download speeds usually plateau at ~3.4 kbps).
A while back I went through the list of updates that Windows wanted to install - I calculated that it would take 73 days online, nonstop, 24/7, to download it all. Since we don't have a second phone line, this simply isn't an option - so our computer has gone mostly unpatched for almost four years (though I was able to force it to get small, important updates, when they appeared). Even our antivirus only gets updated once every two months or so, since leaving the thing connected to the internet overnight to download updates fails half the time due to a dropped connection, necessitating a restart of the download.
I'd love to have internet access at reasonable speeds - it's no fun having a connection where loading Slashdot on the low-bandwidth settings times out half the time, and Gmail and Facebook will never work - but it's simply not an option: DSL and cable lines end miles away, and satellite costs an arm and a leg (currently at $400 installation + $80/month). Fortunately (for me), I'm doing research at a college now, but going home will suck a lot.
I should also mention that even for the shitty connection we've got, the only provider is selling unlimited service for "only" $24.99/month. (sigh)
Just thought I'd give a look at what it's like for people that actually really want better options, but can't give them. It would be easy to justify paying even $50/month for DSL, but we just can't get that.
600,000 laptops lost x 70% are not recovered = 420,000 laptops.
According to TFA, they destroy all unrecovered laptops.
If you consider the average value of those laptops to be $1000, which is probably low, then they are wasting $420,000,000 each year by destroying the laptops.
Why not at least donate them to a charity or school system. This is completely insane.
I Heart Sorting Networks
I want to get broadband, any kind but Satellite, but it's not available to me. The sad thing is, the phone company is charging $22/m for dial-up and only 19.95 or so for basic dsl. We have been waiting for years to get dsl or cable, or something, always another year they tell us.
Another study shows that 62% of dial-up users did not know you can download porn from the internet.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I can't believe that people like that exist!!, i had dial-up for 3 years and everyday wanted to switch to broadband. I guess they never visit youtube or play online videogames.
What your fucktarded grandmother means by "Grandma speed" is what the rest of us call "fucktard speed." Her comprehension is very low. Why don't you do us all a favor and take her for a little ride in your fucking car and when you fucking see a god damned tree, go fucking high speed and crash right into the fucking tree with your fucking seatbelts off. Then there would be two less fucktards stealing my O2.
GO AHEAD, FUCKING FLAME AWAY!!
Where I live, our only option is Satellite or, Dial-up. I live a mile down the road from where a other phone company has DSL availability. Which is always a thought that fumes me. Satellite is great when I need to download something rather large. Though, it has to be planned ahead due to the clouds, moisture, planes overhead destroying any hope for a signal. Since I SSH quiet a bit, dial-up is perfect. Typing via Satellite is to insane too even attempt. There was a time, in the past where I had Cable. Right now I pay $130 for Satellite internet because there is no competition. Heck $50, $60, even $130 for cable would be a God Send. I can't wait till I can use my satellite dish for target practice.
I'm not even convinced most of us need a computer. And when dial-up is like $10 it's hard to argue with the price when you don't mind waiting for your myspace page to load and all your spam to download. For the most people I think the Internet is pretty overhyped and equivalent to TV ownership. Most of us don't need a TV either, but many homes have 3 or more TV sets.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Dial-Up Users "Don't Want Broadband" is like saying local phone telephone users "Don't want interstate calling capabilities". One can only assume that anyone that makes either statement, really doesn't understand what they are saying.
Where I am AT&T offers 768 down 64 up for $15 a month. I was offered a free month if I upgraded to 1.5 down 384 up so now I pay $20 a month.
Of course where I live I have the option between Jasnet, Iserve, Comcast, WMIS, and AT&T. We used to have SBC and Ameritech in the area too until they got bought out. Weird how prices are so low in our little neighborhood.
Competition is for communists... wait.
The problem is that broadband is like indoor toilets. I'm sure that there really were a few people that honest to goodness liked truding out into the snow to take a crap into a hole, but I would bet that there were a lot more people that just didn't want change. I have no doubt that there were people making comments about how they already have an outhouse, so they don't need a fancy smancy indoor toilet. Most of those people just didn't understand the benefit.
A more recent example is the transfer to digital TV. I was going to use the UK (my country), but it's not a good example -- 90% of people have switched to digital TV, but that still leaves 10% who for some reason don't want or don't know about the much improved picture quality, the huge number of extra channels (many of which are useful) or that the analogue signal will be turned off in 2012 (or earlier, depending where you live).
Dial-up will die when the most basic broadband is cheaper than the most basic dial-up. The cheapest unlimited dial-up access I can see is 8/month, the cheapest low-use broadband is 10/month (max 1GB between 00:00 and 20:00, unlimited 20:00-24:00, additional 1GB is 75p). The broadband is clearly worthwhile if you do anything more than sending email. On the other hand, all my grandma does is send email once a week to distant friends, so she can continue to use the penny-per-minute internet access until she wants to use the web more.
Who would want to pay $45 per month to get faster speeds and more bandwidth, when they will be disconnected if they use it?
First we had dial-up. Then ISPs told us we could get faster speeds and more bandwidth if we switched to cable. Now, they are telling us we can't use the speeds and bandwidth that we upgraded to and that we will be disconnected if we do.
With all the double-speak, who would want to waste the extra money and go through the headaches just to check E-Mail, stocks, and the occasional news blurb?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I just undid automatic images, JavaScript and java, and Slashdot loads fast. Props for Slashdot webmasters who still make it look good without JavaScript or images.
What? Where did you get the idea that POTS requires more equipment than any other kind of service, say, PONS (Verizon)? Lunacy.
twitter is just karma whoring desperately, so he's making a lot of dumb mistakes right now. He has to recover from the debacle.
Does this mean that 38% of dial-up users can not upgrade to broadband for one reason or another, even though they want to?
The best part about dialup is how long the pictures take to load. It's like foreplay, only without the talking and the awkward silence when I want her to call me Doctor Hugh Rod Von GoodWood....
I guess if I hit preview right now, I can just submit it after I get back from vacation...
I live literally 2 miles outside of the capital of IL, only thing I can get is dial-up and EVDO...
This goes yet again into the whole no competition thing, as there are two companies in the area, At&T and comcast, (comcast bought out the other two cable companies) neither could care less if they get broadband to the large number of people who don't have it. That may only be a short distance away. (I am 1,500feet out of DSL range) I even called and asked if I could PAY them to install a repeater...they wouldn't even do it then.
Yet for the last 12 years they have been telling me you should have it in your area in the next 6 months or so. I think my view on the length of time which 6 months is, and theirs are rather conflicting.
If brute force isn't working, you are not using enough.
and I DO want broadband.
If you're in an area served by Time Warner, give them a call, and ask about _ALL_ their plans. I was in the same boat you were - I was paying about $65 on my Time Warner bill (antenna service [$13] + 5 mbps broadband internet [$50]) and I wanted to get that total under $50 total. I called customer service and was told about a 768 kbps down / 128 kbps up service that cost just $25/month. I sit on 100 base-T at work, so for home, I thought that was more than adequate. So I signed up for it, and have been happy ever since. I purchase the occasional song from iTunes or Amazon, so this speed is more than adequate for my needs. If I ever have to get a CD or DVD iso, I just let it run overnight.
I realized just recently, I was upgraded to 2 mb down / 384 up connection with no change in price. I don't know if you have Time Warner or not, or who your provider is. But make it sound like you're a looking for a reason to stay with them, etc ...
Real modems are usually less than $5 more.
From essays about the rise of dumb networks, it was my impression that the decentralized internet took less equipment than smart networks like the phone company uses. I'm not sure what you mean by PONS but if you are talking about sharing optical fibers, I'd suggest to Verizon run more fibers instead. Glass is cheap.
From 2005, "The Reader's Digest" version of how it works:
BITS is a cool new file transfer feature of Windows that asynchronously downloads files from a remote server over HTTP. BITS can manage multiple downloads from multiple users while making use of idle bandwidth exclusively. Although the use of BITS is not limited to auto-updating applications, it is the underlying API used by Windows Update. And since it is available to any application, it can be used to do much of the really tough work involved in creating an auto-updating application.
Here is the basic idea. An application asks BITS to manage the download of a file or set of files. BITS adds the job to its queue and associates the job with the user context under which the application is running. As long as the user is logged on, BITS will drizzle the files across the network using idle bandwidth. In fact, the code-name for the BITS technology is Drizzle, which, it turns out, is quite descriptive of what BITS does.
How does all of this work? The technology is actually fairly sophisticated. First, BITS is implemented as a Windows service that maintains a collection of jobs organized into a set of priority queues: foreground, high, normal, and low. Each job in the same priority level is given bandwidth via time slices of about five minutes, in a round-robin fashion. Once there are no jobs remaining in a queue, the next priority queue is inspected for jobs.
Jobs in the foreground queue use as much network bandwidth as they can, and for this reason the foreground priority should only be used by code that is responding to a user request. The remaining priorities, high, normal, and low, are much more interesting because they are all background priorities, which is to say that they only make use of network bandwidth that's not in use.
To achieve this background feature, BITS monitors network packets and disregards packets that it recognizes as its own. The remaining packets are considered the active load on the machine's bandwidth. BITS uses the active load information along with the connection speed and some other statistics to decide whether it should continue downloading files or back off in order to increase throughput for the active user. Because of this, the user doesn't experience bandwidth problems.
The ability to drop what it is doing at a moment's notice is very important for BITS. In many cases, only part of a file is downloaded before BITS must give up the network or even lose connection altogether. The partially downloaded file is saved, however, and when BITS gets another crack at the network, it picks up where it left off. This ability to recover does have some side effects.
Remember that BITS is used to transfer files from HTTP servers. A server should be HTTP 1.1-compliant or at least support the Range header in the GET method for BITS to work. This is because BITS needs to be able to request a portion of a file. In addition, the content being downloaded must be static content such as a markup file, code file, bitmap, or sound. A GET request including a Range header makes no sense when requesting dynamic content such as that produced by CGI, ISAPI, or ASP.NET.
Currently, there are two versions of BITS: 1.0 and 1.5. BITS 1.0 ships with Windows XP and has the following features: interruptible background downloading of files, download prioritization, optional notification of completed jobs and error situations, and optional progress notifications for use with dialog boxes and other UI elements. BITS 1.5 ships with Windows .NET Server. In addition to the features contained in BITS 1.0, version 1.5 has interruptible background uploading of files and authenticated connections using Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate (Kerberos) or Passport. BITS 1.5 is available as a redistributable that is compatible with Windows 2000 and greater (see Background Intelligent Transfer Ser
I seldom have much occasion to post here, especially as I'd probably wind up unread at the bottom of a zillion earlier posts (which I haven't read), but...OK ...
The reason I am still on dialup is because I can't fscking afford broadband. I have occasional access to broadband when I happen to visit my ISP, so I know what I'm missing. Make it affordable and available and see what happens then.
My mother lives 7 miles from downtown Salem, the capital of Oregon, and has no broadband available. This most definitely is a problem for me to be able to communicate with her even if she didn't want it, which she does. It's akin to the early days of answering machines. It's not just a convenience for the recipient, but the caller too. At least she has a shitty satellite connection for the price of broadband, but it still sucks to try to remotely support her, impossible to iChat, etc.
I have a hard time believing this, honestly. I can't help but wonder if this study was conveniently produced just to make the telecoms look less irresponsible in providing rural users with broadband.
I also can't help but wonder if they were very selective about who they were talking to. Most of the people I've known who were in charge of a family's internet access, mothers and fathers, didn't really use the internet while the people who actually used the internet, the sons and daughters, were the ones pleading for better connections.
If it were just MySpace and Facebook, I wouldn't really be concerned about what the children and young adults want, but schools (especially community colleges) seem to be relying more and more on internet access to get anything done, and with everyone wanting to 'go green' it's getting easier to get left behind.
You have to bend over backwards to get a paper form for the FAFSA now that you don't have to end up turning in online. It's much easier to get parents to sign a sheet of paper than register a federal PIN number, and you have to be 25 before you don't need your parents input, regardless of if you live with them.
Again, I don't trust this study. Too much anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Learn basic economics, dickwad. Demand doesn't need to double for the price to double. All that has to double is the price people are willing to pay to ensure supply.
If the bubble were speculative, we'd be seeing hoarding. We're not. We're just competing with way more people for a dwindling resource. Again, had you bothered to learn a little economics before spouting off, you wouldn't have embarrassed yourself.
And just like we wouldn't survive without you, you wouldn't survive without us. We already pay too much in taxes to you rural people because of this stupid frontier myth and the structural rural bias of the Senate. In a halfway just society infrastructure subsidies and price supports for the rural would go away.
I suggest that urban Americans sick of being held for ransom by greedy farmers only buy imported food for a month or two (there's plenty of it), and exert political muscle to stop paying farm subsidies. Without any cash flow whatsoever, rural people will quickly stop thinking they can assrape urban taxpayers for whatever they want.
everything in a name
There's lies, damn lies, then there's statistics.
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
I was under the impression that a number of winmodems were supported. Did you actually check if it was supported or not, if you didn't maybe you would like to check here
I guess many of those dial-up-lovers are hackers. Hackers love dial-up.
Persian Project Management Software as a Service
I read the whole article and it seems very weird.
Isn't broadband supposed to be much cheaper than dial-up unless you want fast uploading (> 2Mbit/s)??
BTW I thought there is no more dial-up on earth now. Is this some archived article from 1998??
hmmm... dumb...
It's not just the "don't want" or "don't know" with the digital TV upgrade. There are still massive areas (like most of rural Wales) that has NO digital broadcasts in either radio or TV. There is not much want to upgrade in these areas because they can't upgrade, so the electronics stores in the area don't sell digital recievers, and the cycle of no demand and no supply continue.
I guess this reflects what is happening with Broadband uptake.
Linux suppot for dialup is next to nil. Yes it's because of those winmodems, but you'd think a couple of the common chipsets would be reverse engineered or something could be done like ndiswrapper.
I mention this cause I have a friend who got a machine with vista and it runs fairly slow, I was going to set him up with linux, but realized he uses a winmodem for dialup. So that blew that idea.
Excuse me? For almost 8 years i had dialup and used Linux exclusively on my machine. Get a hardware modem that connects via serial port and put the winmodem where it belongs - in the trash.
I'm on dial-up because I CAN'T get anything else. I live in a rural area where the population is so low that neither the phone company nor the cable company feel it's worth the cost to upgrade the equipment to allow us to get broadband.
Actually, most winmodems now are so crappy that they are better supported under linux because they use the AC97 circuits.
And when I needed to make a winmodem work in linux, it wasn't that difficult (but again, I only tried it once)
Also, I second the whole 'get a real modem' thing, they are cheap today.
how long until
I imagine many people didn't see much use for the telephone over snail mail or the motorized buggy over horse and cart. Their existing technology worked just fine for them at the time. While it's human nature to resist change and to stick with what we know, it's sad to think people actually "use" the internet on dial-up. Given that broadband can be provided for nearly the same cost as dial-up, it's entirely irrelevant if people "want" broadband. As mentioned above, I don't suppose we need broadband "evangelicals", but it sure would be nice to see US broadband availability on par with other first-world countries!
I thought all the electromechanical (Strowger) exchanges disappeared from the Western world by the early 1990s... where is this exchange? It's a veritable museum piece. Try to get a visit while it is still operational.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
with the internet as it is today, if you have dial up, you don't belong on the internet.
What was your reply to this? Did you ever actually reply, or do you play advocate the same with them as you do here, disappearing when someone lays it down on you? Curious minds want to know.
Will,
I have been expecting to see this kind of e-mail for quite some time now, but
was hoping that maybe it would never come or that the negative postings would
cease, but alas, it has and unfortunately, I have to agree with both Roger
and Carolyn and I am sure that there are many others that are subscribed to
the Clicker's General list that feel exactly the same way. I personally hatepolitics and am by no means a fan of Microsoft, but if people are happy with
using Windows and the software that Microsoft supports, who am I to bash them
for their decision. This posting about Vista, and others that you have made
in the past, is very much like an evangelical Christian standing out in front
of a Catholic Church on Saturday evening or Sunday morning telling all ofparishners that they are going to hell because they don't believe the way
that the evangelical does. It never fosters good will and I doubt that any
are ever converted using that tactic, just as few of the Clicker's members
will be converted using yours.
Is it appropriate to make such posts to the Clicker's general list? No, in my
opinion it is not. No more so than posting a pro Vista message would be to
the LInux SIG list or for that matter to the BRLUG lists. Is it appropriate
to post a pro FOSS message in response to a message like "I want to watch a
PowerPoint presentation but don't own a copy of MS Office." Sure that is
appropriate and may even eventually move that person from Windows to Linux.
I have invested a HUGH amount of time and a not so insignificant amount of my
own money in trying to make this Linux SIG a success, as have a number of
other people. I have volunteered to be on the radio show and have been a
regular at the monthly instructors meetings. I have also gone to great
lengths to build bridges between us and the club management and these efforts
are starting to pay substantial dividends, but then we have an anti-Microsoftposting that undermines all of those efforts and makes the dollars spent seem
to be in vein.
I have no ax to grind or agenda other than to help those who are a wanting
help to use and enjoy Linux the way that I do. I am not looking to save the
computing world, I know that I won't make any money doing this, and genuinely
don't care who gets the credit for whatever success the SIG may enjoy in the
future, but I don't want the SIG to be any more of an uphill battle for me
than it already is. I really don't need to do this. I have a good job. I
already know how to do everything that I want to do with Linux. I just bought
a new bike that I would love to be riding more but I have commitments with
the SIG that take first priority. In fact, I will be missing an all day bike
event this coming Saturday that I would love to attend and show off the new
bike but because I have committed to do the Linux Day Open House, I won't be
able to go. I hope that this commitment has not been made in vein.
I ask that you post a public apology for the comments that you made and that
you refreign from making any more in the future to the General List. If you
wish to make such comments, then I ask that you limit them to the Linux SIGlist and to the BRLUG political list. Having said that, I would prefer that
all negative postings be eliminated from the Linux SIG list. If it is notpositive, it has no place there, but then I am also not a list moderator.
I am coping both Joe and Roger on this e-mail. You are free to include any or
all of this e-mail in your apology to the General List membership as you may
feel is appropriate.
I look forward to seeing your very soon reply.
>> My grandmother refuses to upgrade to broadband even though it's an extra $5/mo because she's used it at my house and it loads too fast.
..Do my sisters need it? no. You can certainly browse the web and send/recieve email on dialup, so I really don't get this obsession over it.
i really do not get this whole idea that the US sucks because of lack of broad band adaptation.
>>I mean, I have broadband, and it's nice for what i do. But do my parents need it?
----------
Arrggg! SHOOT THE LOT OF YOU MACINTOSH/LINUX HUGGING WEENIES!
I live in the deep woods of Canada, yet only 12 Km from a bunch of DSLAMS.
And on the US border too!
Of course, in the even more primitive rural USA, conditions are far worse...
But I'd just like to add that EVERYONE should have access to hi-speed. Like the folks in so-called "3rd-world" countries.
Hellooo.. USA? Are you listening?
Guess what: You are joinimg the "4th world". - Like Canada has already done.
Wake up!
If I were younger I'd be packing my bag and moving to India, like my kids are planning to do.
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- aqk
F U
Sure it does! At minimum you need the grass, a fine piece of paper and a cigarette lighter. In the event you find these acessories lacking, you can improvise with bread paper and your stove.
.. At least in areas where Broadband is available. I can understand if it's all you can get, but who would prefer paying $21.95 a month for dial up AOL when they can get DSL lite for not much more? The internet is no longer dial up friendly. Sites are loading themselves with content friendly only to fast connections. I think dial up plans should be replaced with a basic internet plan that should include a lower speed DSL with free dial up access for people who can't use the DSL in their area. Make broadband access mandatory for ISP membership and those who can't use it simply won't. And, when it becomes available in their area they can elect to connect the equipment and use it at no extra fee.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Great job! You insulted me and then agreed with my post! Troll harder next time.
The crux of your post is that a "tech" person downloads service packs and uses SVN (and at home, of all places). Now, I can add "troll" to the list of words you do not understand. I sure hope nobody researching you online reads this. No! Wait a minute, they should know that Koiu Lpoi is stupid. Yeah, better to know.
Was this survey conducted on-line, or by phone?
sic