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2/3 of Americans Without Broadband Don't Want It
Ant writes in with news that won't be welcomed by the incoming US administration as it tries to expand the availability of broadband Internet service. A recent report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project indicates, as noted by Ars Technica, that two-thirds of Americans without broadband don't want it. "...when we look at the overall reasons why Americans don't have broadband, availability isn't the biggest barrier. Neither is price. Those two, combined, only account for one-third of Americans without broadband. Two-thirds simply don't want it. The bigger issue is a lack of perceived value."
Of course they want it. They just don't want to pay scary fees for it.
It's Old Century Ignorance talking. By 2013 this topic won't exist.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Remember there are still plenty of people in this country who don't own (and don't want to own) a computer or any other type of internet-connected device. They aren't necessarily opposed to computers, they just don't care to own one. I know plenty of people who fit that demographic, and even if you gave them broadband for free they still wouldn't be interested.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Who doesn't want broadband? Old people, that's who.
They don't want the Internet. They want to knit and watch the Price is Right. Who are we to condemn them for that?
Some people on this site make an awful lot of noise about not watching TV. What's wrong with that? It's all about personal choice.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
People use the "they are deprived of it" "they deserve it" "its a right" more often than not because they want something themselves.
It is far easier to decry we don't have enough availability when you reference others - you can assuage your guilt that way.
Look, relatives of mine live on a farm. They care about the weather and look up current prices on feed and end products they sell. They have no need of anything but dial up and its done at the dark of the night because that is when they are done outside. To them its a tool. The problem with too many people is they can't tell a tool from entertainment anymore... they cannot tell work from addiction
Honestly I could live just fine without the net and cell phones, I grew up in the age when they weren't being rammed down our throats by everyone who wants to make a buck and that is what this availability is really about - businesses need to get into our wallets and someone decided that this will be the new means of doing so, trouble is we aren't playing along hence we must be ignorant.
yeah, whatever. I have high speed internet, my relatives do not, we are both happy and I would not change them and they would not change me. No ignorance, just acceptance that other people enjoy their lives just the way they are and aren't missing out on anything
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Suppose it were only some $12 a month like Dialup is now. They'd like it. For example there's a huge knitting club that meets in our local bookstore. I have heard them talk about downloading knitting patterns. It would take them 12 seconds instead of 38 minutes each.
It's a P-word thing. (Paradigm).
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Do you guys seriously think that some Asian country that touts 90% coverage means 90% of residents access the Internet through broadband? Surely, they also have more than 10% old grandparents who don't use computers. Their "coverage" is defined as "if they wanted to, they could get it" as opposed to the actual subscription rate. It's just a different definition of coverage, in terms of which I think the US has a pretty good coverage already (although it could always be cheaper and faster).
I once had a signature.
The arstechnica article and the Slashdot summary do not make it clear that the 2/3 figure includes people who don't use the Internet at all. For dial-up users, price/availability accounts for about 1/2 of the people who don't have broadband.
You're always going to have people who don't adopt a new technology. These people shouldn't be used to not improve the technology for the rest of us.
We will all be, eventually, old people. And we wont want to pay for, nor we will be interested in, that crappy holistic multiversic quantinet our kids will happily plug in their brains.
I say leave the elders alone and let them buy their paper and sit at the diner and chat amongst friends over a cup of joe.
The net, contrary to all that idiocy, does not automatically make you or anyone smarter, better or more productive. Hey, Ive seen pretty good arguments -Giovanni Sartori- that point in the other direction for some cases, and what I see being done to language in SMS messages by youngsters makes me want to send them all to linguistic concentration camps.
Why this strange neurosis on trying to get everyone to facebook their ass?
I dont really get social networks actually, I think they are the worst to ever happen to privacy and will eventually cost us individual freedom.
Now youtube is another story. I like that one and their pr0n equivalents (better).
So there: people that dont want broadband perhaps like real life better and im not sure thats bad at all.
NO SIG
Holy crap people, not everyone *needs* broadband. Watching retarded YouTube videos and other crap isn't an essential part of life. If your only use for the Internet is email and browsing Wikipedia you can get by just fine with dialup. Personally, I'm a bandwidth addict, but my mom couldn't care less. She's happy with email and reading the occasional news story. America isn't going to collapse because these people don't have broadband.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
most other countries have a higher broadband adoption ratio with better speeds
and lower prices, so if the majority of the people living in the US without
broadband don't want cheaper/better performing internet then something must
be really really wrong.
I would be guessing the lack of competition, throttling, being treated like dirt
and then spending a (comparatively) huge amount of money for the privilege
has probably scared those people off.
My parents are European immigrants, my mum was born in 1939, just before the start of the war, my dad in 1941, during the war.
They both grew up with post-war shortages, and as a result they're naturally frugal. My dad uses the internet for email, forums and light web surfing, all on dial-up. Why? Because it's cheaper.
Here in Vancouver, dial up is about $10 per month, broadband is about $30 per month. To my dad's thinking, that's an extra $240 per year that he'd rather have in his pocket. If he needs broadband for something like Google earth he just strolls down to the library and surfs for free. He's retired, after all.
It took us forever to get mother-in-law on broadband. Her computer is a cast-off donated by one of her sons which I've upgraded a couple of times. Thing is, she only uses it for email. Why would you need broadband for that? She finally converted when the local cable company offered her a package that essentially included it for free compared to the combined cost of phone/tv/dialup.
Parenthetically, I think this is the only way you're going to convert casual users -- by bundling broadband in with services considered more important.
Having broadband at her house helps me when our family visits, because I can work from there if necessary (I'm on call essentially 24/7) instead of driving down to the local coffee shop to use their wifi. But for her, the value is that her Outlook Express mailbox fills up in 2 seconds instead of 12. Given her computer takes 4 1/2 minutes to boot, the speed of fetching her email is down in the noise.
I think most of the unwashed public just can't see any value. (other than looking at pr0n...) This seems odd to us geeks, but it's demonstrably true -- demonstrable if you know any non-geeks. Unless you're streaming video, the higher bandwidth is barely perceptible. Who cares if a page loads in 1/8 of a second instead of 1/2 of a second? Well, I do, (and there seems to be unnecessary latency on my 20/5 FIOS line) but I observe (without completely understanding) that normal people do not.
If you want broadband saturation, you need a Killer App. Until very recently, there wasn't any legitimate non-geek use for it. Now you can catch up on TV episodes and watch old programs as streaming video. This is a good start, but it isn't as cool to the rank and file as you might think. Fred and Ethyl are used to watching TV on their TV, and having to crouch over a 17 inch monitor and poke webpage buttons with a mouse is not part of their paradigm. (There are solutions for all of this, but they're not well integrated -- forget it unless you know a geek.)
The Netflix box, Apple TV, are a good start -- they're actually *more* convenient than driving to Blockbuster, rather than *less* convenient. (I tried to explain torrents to my mom once. Yeah, right...) But the hard fact is, Fred and Ethyl are still more likely to watch whatever is on cable at the time their butts happen to be on the couch. It's just the way it is.
In this response, I've completely ignored the huge amount of non-entertainment information available on the internet, because I think the great majority largely ignores it also. If an online news service has a million unique hits, that's not much in a country of 300+M people. I suspect that the great majority still wants someone attractive-looking to tell them what's important in 43 minutes minus commercials. This concerns me, because it tends to further stratify the country, but making someone buy a product they don't want and don't think they need is always going to be problematic.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
They're sort of "trying to speak your language". When I'm talking to someone who thinks that only communists see value in infrastructure, I use the interstate highway system as an example, and they usually end up begrudgingly agreeing that infrastructure isn't all bad. And it works partially because it's sometimes the same people who LOVE cars because they believe that the alternatives (e.g. trains) are communist too.
And yes, I'd prefer to talk about something like trains, and the benefit it would have for our country to have a decent railway system, but that's kind of a step too far for some people. Besides, I can't exactly point to our existing train system as a rousing success, since it's been so poorly maintained.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, no, I'm not a communist or socialist. I'm just interested in having our be economically prosperous and generally efficiently run. I don't like the idea of the federal government doing very much, but building/maintaining/regulating large-scale infrastructure is one of a couple things the federal government should actually be doing.
The don't want it because they don't know what it can do. It's the same reason we don't have a good national (or even regional) electric train system. Few people have ever seen one, know that they exist, or have any idea of the benefits.
You abandoned your blog because you had nothing interesting to say? ... I wish more people would do that.