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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.
I'm not American, but I would have thought that mobile data is more expensive than wired? Certainly that's the case in the UK.
Internet is a utility. You can have it at home, expect it when you travel around, and so on. So why is the government letting ISPs scam us?
I can't even get wired home internet. All I can get is a WISP which charges $80/mo for 200GB at 7.5 Mbps peak (supposed to be up to 10 Mbps, but... fail)
DSL is hot garbage, cable companies overcharge and try to bone you at every opportunity...
Maybe if we could get some fair laws surrounding internet access? But our government is currently only concerned with making sure they can spy on us.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Is this gonna work, with hundreds of people in an area watching YouTube and Netflix over mobile? This isn't WiFi, but pure phone.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Followed by this article: 98% of Americans abandoning broadband say that lousy ISPs were the primary reason for doing so. "Even 4G LTE is cheaper than the rippoff prices" said one user. "Verizon wouldn't offer us any FIOS, so this was our only non-DSL option." another claimed. In other news, Google Fiber and FIOS are holding onto 90% of users.
When I see people bragging they use over 200GB/month on mobile data plans that are unlimited, I could have already guessed they have no home internet.
With what I do online this could never be an option. Downloading through steam would be near impossibly expensive and we would see a return of HPB and LPB terminology. Old school gamers should get that reference.
Latency on wireless connection just varies way too much.
In Canada anyhow, wired Internet is both tremendously faster and cheaper too especially in my area with FIOS and unlimited packages. All mobile packages are expensive and charged per MByte. A good workaround is to connect to your friend's wifi points or to the numerous free wifi points found all over the city. While in theory I could afford mobile Internet why waste the price of home Internet for extremely limited service.
100% the fault of cable companies and shit ISP's.
They want to keep the USA as a third world country as far as internet connectivity goes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If the average user is being asked if they use wired broadband, but use wifi they'll say no even though their wifi router is being fed by it.
For the low end -- Maybe this can be chalked up as another "cost of being poor." Mobile carriers charge an arm and a leg for data now since they're not making money on calls or SMS anymore, plus low income people are less likely to have a service contract and have to do pay as you go rates. So, if you can't afford a cable bill and a mobile phone, the phone wins out. These costs of being poor really suck, and include things like having to rely on check cashing places to do your banking or buying expensive unhealthy packaged food because your neighborhood lacks access to fresh food.
Not sure about the high end though, It would seem to me that the average high income household would have 20 devices installed, several XBoxes for the kids, etc. That kind of hardware requires a wired service of some kind to power its Internet consumption. I can see lots of people cutting out TV, especially high income folks who don't have time to watch it, but not Internet service.
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.
Figures it's from that seattle times electronic rag. First, the study is from the USCB. They couldn't conduct a impartial study of the general location of people's assholes. Second, it's a garbage piece from ST.
How the fuck did it make it to /. frontpage??? Honestly - is there any filters anymore?
VR Streaming will bring back the home broadband.
There is a delicate balance between "Most convenient connection..." and "...which allows the best porn commonly available."
The entire benefit of a wired network connection is stability, speed, and always-on, unlimited data use.
When greedy ISPs like Comcast don't maintain the quality of their networks speed and reliability suffer. Data caps are the last straw.
When the benefits of wired internet are taken away, it's logical that consumers would seek other choices......market economics at work.
Reading those numbers, some Americans are abandoning wired internet. Only SOME. The vast majority remained wired to the internet in some form or another. My guess is that singles prefer paying for one internet connection, their mobile device. Maybe couples. Families, however, have far different requirements than singles or couples, and those requirements for faster broadband are only likely to increase over time.
Really? If we only had cars and suddenly motorcycles and pickup trucks were introduced, would we say people are "abandoning" cars when car sales suddenly take a drop? I hear everyone is abandoning PCs for tablets too. And abandoning still photography for video. And abandoning butter for margarine (...now I dating myself).
I personally cannot stand surfing the web with a phone. Tablets are only slightly better, but as a married father of 2 boys under 5 and a geek. Being able to stream netflix, or purchased and ripped videos, movies and other content is invaluable. I'm currently on the tail end of a retrofit project where I have 47 cat6 ethernet drops, 17 POTS (cat6 as well and easily changeable for VOIP) phone lines and Century Link is currently laying fiber for a FTTH deployment in Denver. And a business class 1200ac WAP.
I have multiple runs of quad shielded rg6 and cat6 to my DMARC's, all my rooms and even attic for future home automation/surveillance purposes and have multiple attic mounted antennas in my attic (thanks to previous owners) the only thing that I have done is changed/updated the baluns and upgraded wiring to said quad shielded rg6 from rg5(8/9) and home run everything to my furnace room.
I say let the peasants have wireless.
I have seen massive response improvement's in my roku3, and multiple RPI's running openelec/retropie. In fact the only place I haven't seen a noticeable improvement from going wired is the shitty Blue-ray player that we use for netflix/amazon in the Living room. Even if the uplink to my house is comcast shitty basic. The rest of my house massively benefits from having wires. When I get FTTH I pity the fools using wireless for their PS4/xbox setups.
NT.
A little less than 100 years ago, rural customers in the same area had problems convincing the market to actually provide electricity to the area. Instead of completely abandoning the area to be left behind by time, the federal government established a corporation to generate and supply electricity to the rural population of the Tennessee valley. While it faced many of the same libertarian arguments, it has been quite successful in keeping the area economically viable. And all that while being a careful compromise between free market principles and those crazy socialist visions of a better tomorrow. Crazy what happens when people work together.
Id bet that what the study is really showing is that when the customer orders a new cable setup, or a triple-play, or whatever, they get the free in-home router that just happens to be wireless a well as wired.
C|N>K
I live less than a mile from a Verizon Central Office and they put fiber in my neighborhood so I can get 500mbs wired. When wireless approaches the 150 I pay for I'll consider that. BTW I work for a competitor to Verizon.
nothing to see here - move along
...and for what definition of "Americans"?
I can totally see a young person on a limited budget for whom "using the Internet" amounts to social media sites, clickbait news sites, and cat videos not bothering with any kind of wired broadband.
For them, there's nothing wired broadband gives them that they're not getting on their phone or tablet or tethered to their laptop.
Then there's living arrangements. I can remember more than one circus around getting and keeping a phone line in a shared house situation. What "tenant" has their name on the bill? At least one place I lived in for a summer there was nobody actually living there whose name was on the lease. Fortunately the group living there was responsible enough that we paid the rent and all the utilities, so we at least kept the lights on and kept the phone working.
I use my mobile data very seldom, so I have little experience on this. Also, I am in Mexico, which might have somewhat inferior infrastructure — although I understand that, in major cities at least, it is very close to what you get in the USA.
I don't like mobile networking. It is quite laggier, and its quality variance (both in bandwidth and in latency) is much higher than wired Internet. Of course, it can be easily explained with many people walking into or out of my cell, with the antennas having to synchronize with all of the devices and whatnot.
Maybe it's not so annoying for people that don't use interactive sessions... But given the nature of most Web pages (and darned apps), every day interaction gets closer to "real" interactive sessions.
I called my option "realistic" because I don't usually count on living 100 years.
But I envy your optimism.
www.google.com/voice
I currently have the cheapest available broadband connection I know of in Mexico — I pay MX$390 a month, which is a bit over US$20. My connection is 5MBps. Of course, we have much bigger data plans... I am just happy with 5. Can't you get such prices in the USA?
My sister-in-law does this for her family because the alternative is a 1.5 mbit DSL connection. That's it. She lives in a city of 85,000 surrounded by similar population density level cities, and somehow they just never got any ISPs attention in huge swaths of the city.
This is not even that uncommon a scenario in residential Salt Lake City, just north of me. It's not that American users are poorly evaluating things, it's that American internet sucks.
This forum Sig is licensed under the LGPL.
If you've never traveled across it (not flown across -- traveled across) or you've never been to the US at all and just know what LA looks like from the movies, do yourself a favor and take a look at a map first, and compare the scale to $your_country. The US is huge. And especially the western half of the country, where most areas with residents were built in the last 100 years, and most of the rest is completely open land.
"Internet access" for the downtown core of a major city, for the suburbs and residential areas outside of dense urban zones, for small towns, and for rural areas 3 miles from your nearest neighbor mean *vastly* different things. Infrastructure investment and wired vs wireless communications in some areas carry tradeoffs involving public safety, reliability, access, and available technology.
So before you comment, take that into account. Thanks.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Prior to the gigabit rollout in my neighborhood which just happened this year, I had honestly considered the same. Cell phone internet in my area is cheaper than wired internet. The cell easily pulls 80mbps and an unlimited plan which supports tethering is well under $100/mo, whereas cable internet at 30/6mbps was $99/mo. Why honestly pay for both!? This is similar to why POTS systems are mostly dead, because why have one when you have a cell, too? (yes, there are a couple reasons that could be debated, but for the majority of people and situations, those corner cases are hardly a concern)
I think the IoT will change this trend for higher income households. I was just recently lamenting that both my 8-port switch upstairs and my 4-port WiFi router downstairs are full and I have so many wireless devices I have lost count. I have a DIY security system, home automation (temp and lights), and remote video surveillance all accessed and controlled from my phone when I am away from home. All of that, and my wife and I combined barely make over the $100k threshold. I would hate to give up either home or mobile internet at this point.
Nevermore.
I'm not an American, but as I understand it, the US market is dominated by just one or two ISPs (Comcast, Verizon?), who control everything and pretty much dictate price and availability and both are awful.. If that's the case, its not surprising people don't want to play ball with them.
Coz wired connections in US are expensive and slow amongst the large group of people who're switching.
The cheapest low-speed Comcast plan I can get is $70/month all-up, about $850/year.
If I were making $50k/year, spending $45k on basic necessities like housing, food, clothes and school stuff for my kids -- then no way would Comcast be a good use of 20% of my disposable income. No way!
Apart from the few unfortunates who live in the boondocks, the people I know who have only wireless internet have made a choice based on how they use the internet. Most young people would rather cut off an arm than be without 24/7 access to facebook, twitter, etc. Some of these folks receive SNAP and shop at the food bank and Goodwill. In my city, you can get basic FIOS and a dumb phone for less monthly expense than an iPhone with a data plan. So when they claim they can't afford internet, that's BS. It's a choice. And oh by the way, get off my lawn. COE
COE
There is almost no place in the world which is populated which has population densities as low as the USA.
Finland's population density according to World Bank's population density table is half that of the United States, with Sweden between them. Yet I'm told Sweden and Finland have better home Internet connectivity than the United States.
In reading the details of the study; this would beg to question how accurate the participant results are , and how many of the participants consider what being truly mobile really means, and if said views are based on users with wired internet through a wireless router using nothing but mobile devices as mobile-only within that household. Don't get me wrong. Going wireless is not necessarily a bad thing, however, reliability, and security would just be a few of the top concerns with a mobile-only solution.
Cell phones are an expensive luxury.
What you said was true before payphones largely disappeared.
Instead, it was used as a mobile data network.
FTFY. You can't call on WiMAX. It was just mobile data. Just because most people used it with phones doesn't mean there weren't USB modems that could be connected to a wireless router - or even wireless routers with radios built-in.
What would you expect a last-mile infrastructure on WiMAX to look like? I know a few laptops had it built-in, but that doesn't make nearly as much sense as having an outdoor antenna at home feeding your modem/router and having a local wifi network.
If you are gaming, doing school, have kids, like to get your downloads in seconds/minutes, do heavy uploading, and watch a lot of movies you are not going to use a phone to do it.
Tethering to the phone works just fine, but is not robust enough to support everything going on at home.
If I was always on the go and never home, sure the internet would get dropped, but that's not the case.
Really? If we only had cars and suddenly motorcycles and pickup trucks were introduced, would we say people are "abandoning" cars when car sales suddenly take a drop?
If car sales decline enough that car makers no longer see economies of scale in continuing to produce compact cars, people who have a valid use case for a compact car will be disappointed. The same thing happened to 10 inch compact laptops at the end of 2012.
as TFA says, there are free public options for internet access, even if they're not great
Given the banker's hours that many public libraries keep, an option that closes for the night or weekend before you arrive from school or work is not an option at all. If you get off work at 5, for instance, good luck taking the bus from work to the library and getting any substantial work done before the library closes at 6.
My phone is 3 to 4 times faster than my basic cable (15/0.8) at home.
But how fast would it complete, say, a 30 GB download of a game purchased on Steam? Cable at 15 Mbps completes it in 5 hours; cellular Internet would take months because of the much smaller cap that most cellular ISPs enforce.
Snopes says the Lifeline program began with landlines under President Ronald W. Reagan and was extended to mobile phones under President George W. Bush. Perhaps AC thinks Welfare is these Presidents' middle name.
just use less data
Good luck with that, especially if you work from home, or if you own multiple PCs during months when Microsoft is pushing out a new 3 GB build of Windows to licensees.
From that page: "You will be required to verify an existing U.S. phone number to get a Google Voice number."
A landline is more expensive these days!
If you already have an always-on Internet connection, a magicJack landline is about $3 per month.
Sure, the phone carrier will recompress the streams to whatever the local tower can handle.
In Binge On, the carrier doesn't necessarily "recompress". When the user requests video from a participating provider, T-Mobile applies a QoS throttle on the order of 1.5 Mbps, as described in its white paper. The video provider detects low throughput and switches to an appropriate stream. This bitrate is sufficient for standard-definition (360p or 480p), as shown by TXD2005 and TXD2009 encoding standards that specify close to 1 Mbps for a 90 minute movie on one CD.
You can delete this off your site right now. The Wired ISP's don't need any more ammo in their campaign to get rid of all Wired internet and force everyone onto shitty small capped LTE connections.
Price, Speed, Caps, we are a long way from Wireless being able to take over for Wired for the majority of Americans.
I keep saying this every year but why the hell aren't we paying $19 a month for Gb unlimited internet connections for everyone American at this point? This needs to be one of those Kennedy moments where a speech is given and we make it a priority to make this happen for all Americans within 5 years. Plenty of unemployed/underemployed Americans would jump on the opportunity to help build out our infrastructure.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
There were wifi routers with WiMax receivers built in for home use. I don't know if anyone still sells them in the US. When Sprint bought all the frequencies instead of letting local ISPs use it for last mile installations, it killed the technology in the US. It was deployed in other countries.
So in a sense it was wildly commercially successful. Just nobody wanted to pay for the spectrum as much as they did. Economies of scale probably means that it didn't cost that much more to buy from Sprint than a WISP. Most of the WISPs I've seen are able to price gouge well enough that most people use LTE anyway.
I think you will find that is called SEO!
The more shite on a page, the higher its Google rank. (Shite is worth LOADS. The value of shite is the reason bankers are paid so much).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I live in an area with lots of apartments/condos. Most people here are young, perhaps recent graduates, making a decent living, but still working their way up the pay ladder. It's common here for neighbors to share an internet connection -- one person gets the physical connection, and in exchange for sharing their WiFi password, a few neighbors chip in on the bill. So on paper, maybe 2/3 of the residents have a broadband connection, but in reality, almost 100% are using one.
I'm not trying to argue the ethics of this -- just pointing out that it's probably a common enough practice to skew some of the statistics in areas of denser population.
You're supposed to keep your home Internet connection and use wifi opportunistically on your mobile.
The spectrum is finite, after all.
Poor person. Noun. Plural: poor people. (1) A person whose entire access to a near infinite amount of information and productivity tools is via a $75/mo mobile device with computing power equal to entire personal computers in relatively recent history, transmitting data at speeds faster than were commonly available in residential wired broadband in relatively recent history.
Somebody save them!!!
The answer instead is cellular internet would be much faster but ... how much would it cost.
Let's just say that when the data usage overage to download a game purchased on Steam exceeds the price of said game, there's a problem. That's like buying a $30 trinket on eBay with $300 shipping.
Why do you presume a situation that demands huge data use over the internet to "prove" that it will be more expensive for poor people to use wireless internet than wired
Because Slashdot has posted stories of users that found themselves in such "a situation that demands huge data use over the internet". It's in at least one comment to each story about the Get Windows 10 (GWX) app or Windows 10's automatic updates (example).
don't own mutliple PCs
I imagine that a lot of parents own more than one PC so that their children do not have to stand in line for a chance to do their homework. So may I quote you on recommending choosing to own only one PC in order to save on overage fees during update season in case the breadwinning parent loss his or her job?
Payphones? Even when they were very prevalent I can't remember ever needing to use one.
Instead of a cell phone or payphone, what did you use to arrange a ride (if you don't drive) or to arrange assistance in case of car trouble (if you do)?
If I could get my relatives and work to learn how to use email and such properly I'd be tempted to kill the landline phone.
If you're far from a public phone, you're likely also far from a public Internet terminal.
Remembering phone numbers and begging for permission to use someone else's cell phone won't work if "any random person" agrees with jedidiah that a cell phone is a luxury.
A 300 GB per month cap on Comcast is much better for home use than a 10 GB per month cap on cellular, especially in a household with more than one person.
1) Most users are low end. That is, they use the internet for browsing websites, email, and social media. All of which is easily done with a mobile device. The moderate users might also use something like Netflix, which is probably the only profitable group left, but most ISP are also TV providers so they want people to buy their own TV packages... i.e. they are their own worst enemy.
2) Terrible ISP for years. Speeds should be going up, while prices should be going down. This has not happened. While speeds have increased, cost has increased year over year, every year for the sake of more and more profit, and customers are getting weary. In addition to that, most of the low end internet packages have been done away with if favor of a much larger baseline package. Likely this is because they want you to package your internet with your cable, phone, and mobile for a "discount" because they provide all of those things as well and it is an "incentive" to customers to do so. i.e. again they are their own worst enemy.
3) Mobile Improvement. Unlike home internet, speed has increased, and costs have largely remained the same. In Canada the only exception is that the amortization of new phones are now capped at 2 years, with the difference being added to their bill packages so it seems like it is more, but it is more less the same over time.
So no, not exactly surprising really. Even with a total lack of real competition in most cases, ISP for the most part (not independents but the big telecommunication companies), have really done a horrible job by essentially competing with themselves in an effort to drive profit across their various holdings.
Whilst this is technically true, it's assuming a home internet connection (when the point I got from the story is you can't assume this).
The assumption was that porting your landline to magicJack may free up enough money in the budget to buy home Internet from the cable company.
Also, there are cellphone options even cheaper (if you don't need many minutes); specifically, the plan I started my kids off with at $10 every 4 months (100minute pool to use over the course of the 4 months @ $2.50/mo, taxes included, PagePlus).
Is this carrier willing to activate low-minute, voice-only service on a smartphone? Or is it like Virgin Mobile was a few years ago, where only flip phones qualified for this sort of low-usage service and people with smartphones had to settle for a substantially more expensive ($35/mo) plan intended for higher-usage subscribers, which includes 450 minutes and data? The notice "You cannot activate a 4G device on this plan" on Page Plus's page for the plan you describe worries me.
If I needed a ride I arranged it before hand.
Plans may change. Shopping, for example, occasionally takes far longer than I had arranged due to unforeseen complications. Besides, I carry a cell phone because my ride has occasionally not shown up due to having fallen asleep.
Sometimes it meant taking public transport instead
I ride the bus, but I carry a cell phone because plans may change. I may end up with things to do after the city buses stop running for the night or for the weekend.
Or plans may be unsuitable for public transport in the first place. For example, a few years ago, I was taking a college class that got out at 9 PM, when the last bus pick-up of the evening was at 8:45 or so (source: fwcitilink.com). I rode the bus there and pre-arranged a ride home, but my pre-arranged ride slept in a couple times. I was able to call my second and third choices for a pick-up.
riding a bike
I ride a bike, but I carry a cell phone because plans may change. My bike has at times broken down.
or hoofing it on foot.
I walk some places, but I carry a cell phone because my limit for continuous walking is about 7.5 miles or 12 km, and my limit for things being within practical walking distance is about a third of that.
The time I blew up the motor in my car I hitched a ride
Some people are willing to pay $7.50 per month for a cell phone for the safety of not having to hitchhike.
(#51942103) Payphones? Even when they were very prevalent I can't remember ever needing to use one.
(#51947607) to the nearest gas station and used the landline there [...] there was a payphone I would have been told to use if it hadn't been broken.
So you did manage to "remember ever needing to use one."
There are definite advantages to having a cell phone, but it brings a cash cost
Plus the cost of having to sit and wait for a bus or walk home instead of getting work done for which you would be paid.
I think most people could get by without them with little real danger.
Some people would disagree with you about "little real danger" associated with hitchhiking.
"So you did manage to "remember ever needing to use one.""
Nope, I could have used one, if it weren't broken, but I didn't need it as evidenced by using the the service stations phone. You might as well claim that every time I had to wait for a ride I needed a pay or cell phone to arrange something faster, I didn't need it because I'm patient.
One of my favorite Dr. Seuss lines is "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant." If I make plans with someone and pass the point where I can easily communicate a change in plans, I stick with the last known good plan. I've already admitted the convenience of having a cell phone as it allows for more immediate changes in plans. But not having that crutch is hardly the travesty you seem to believe it is.
Hitch Hiking is and always has been relatively safe. The over hyped fears surrounding it are right up there with the stranger danger myths we perpetuate among children. Not that I'm advocating it as a primary mode of transportation, but the one time I was in a situation to need a ride without a plan a stranger helped me out.
I was referring not to children who own a home but instead to parents who own or rent a home.
Oh none. So what does the homework have to do with it?
A parent who suddenly loses his or her job does not suddenly cease to be responsible for his or her children.
affluence choices
I apologize, but I fail to understand what you mean by "affluence choices".
Or do you reckon they'll find a way to manage without, however debilitating that is?
By "debilitating" do you include a choice to fail to graduate on time, a choice to move from the school system to the criminal justice system?
Phone is nearly as necessary as food today, and more necessary than internet.
By "phone" do you mean a land line shared by all residents or individual mobile phone plans for each resident? And by "Internet" do you mean wired or mobile?