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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.
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.
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.
Even though gaming is a big industry, the % of the population who plays latency-sensitive games is very small. Most gaming is mobile Candy Crush style games, that can tolerate high latency connections, or also online but non-realtime freemium games.
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.
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 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?
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)
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!
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.
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.
I actually did a web search for "welfare phones" literally, and found relevant articles that explained it, so it's not just the AC in question who is referring to them as such. As previously stated just now being made aware of this I am unsure what my opinion of it is, but my 'penciled-in' reaction is that it's not necessarily a bad thing; we live in a day and age where, if you're looking for work, not having at least a phone will more or less doom you, and preferably you should have some sort of Internet access. Job offers come fast and furious for many, and if you are delayed at all responding to them, it'll go to someone else. So of all the things that my tax dollars are going to, this may be one of the least objectionable ones. People who actually want to work being given something that enables them to accomplish that isn't a bad thing, and $2B on the scale of what the government spends on much dumber things is a drop in the bucket. The only bad thing that I can think about it off the top of my head is that the money is actually going to the wireless companies, who are all greedy sons-of-bitches to start with. I'd much prefer it was coming out of their pockets instead of mine.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!