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Americans Abandoning Wired Home Internet, Shows Study (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Americans as a whole are growing less likely than before to have residential broadband, according to new data on a sample of 53,000 Americans. In plain English, they're abandoning their wired Internet for a mobile-data-only diet -- and if the trend continues, it could reflect a huge shift in the way we experience the Web. The study, conducted for the Commerce Department by the U.S. Census Bureau, partly upholds what we already knew. Low-income Americans are still one of the biggest demographics to rely solely on their phones to get online. Today nearly a third of households earning less than $25,000 a year exclusively use mobile Internet to browse the Web. That's up from 16 percent in 2013. They're often cited as evidence of a digital divide; families with little money to afford a home Internet subscription must resort to free Wi-Fi at libraries and even McDonald's to do homework, look for jobs and find information. But people with higher incomes are ditching their wired Internet access at similar or even faster rates. In 2013, 8 percent of households making between $50,000 and $75,000 a year were mobile-only. Fast-forward a couple of years, and that figure is 18 percent. Seventeen percent of households making between $75,000 and $100,000 are mobile-only now, compared with 8 percent two years ago. And 15âpercent of households earning more than $100,000 are mobile-only, versus 6 percent in 2013.
There's no doubt that there is a huge shift taking place towards mobile. The problem is that normal people never wanted to be sys-admins. They were forced into that for a little while because it was the only way to get online, but it was a disaster to try to make them be that, and so they are rapidly changing to mobile now to avoid that mess. People are sick to death of dealing with traditional PCs, the update nightmares, the malware nightmares, overly complex interfaces they don't understand, being blamed for any problems they had... If you really sit down to compare mobile UIs to desktop ones, you'll see why people prefer it. They are made for normal people to use effectively without having to act as sys-admins, a job they are not trained for and don't understand. Add in that people are on the go and want to do things from wherever they are, not be tied to their desk.
This trend is going to expand. It's being driven by young people, and as those people get out into the world in bigger numbers it will change the whole landscape of computing towards the common man, and away from the nerd. This makes nerds grumpy of course, so they will deny that this is happening, just like the Unix Workstation people denied the rise of the PC.