Broadband users just became the majority!

55% of adult Internet users have broadband @ home or work

[burkel]

Read Clickz's article from today: The Broadband Tipping Point [clickz.com]

Here are some of pewinternet.org's source stats:

• 55% of all adult Internet users – or 34% of all adult Americans - have high-speed access either at home or work
  
• 39% of all adult Internet users – or 24% of all adult Americans – have high-speed access at home - an increase of 60% since March 2003
  
• 52% of college educated people age 35 and younger – has broadband connections at home
  

A related article from January predicted U.S. users to more than double by 2008.

In comparison, the "NS4 is dead [webmasterworld.com]" thread was posted on this site a year ago when the more conservative browser stats from the USGS site [usgs.gov] showed 3.25% NS4 visitors to their site (compared to 1.17% today - and soon to be statistically negligible).

So, we're far from statistically negligible dial-up users, which unlike some browsers, don't ever have to go away but you can say broadband is "the norm" now at least.

Plenty of people resist the "optimizing for broadband [webmasterworld.com]" idea at this point (whatever that means exactly) but there are some good markets for broadband. The company profiled in "Forget Ad Formats -- Try a Customized Home Page [clickz.com]," has sites catering to kids using educational Flash games that may take "25 seconds on a 56k modem." That's death for some kids' attention spans, yet they're still striking a good balance.

Granted, the most popular of most sites are also the lightest on bandwidth but lets say by 2008, 50% of all U.S. adult Internet users and 75%-80% world-wide have broadband at home, would you create broadband-rich content with a dial-up option by then (assuming search engines clue in by then)?

The reason people switched to broadband:

• 36% cited a slow or frustrating connection
  
• 21% wanted to download files faster
  

So, if you build it will they come?

[Farix]

Are those figures for those who have broadband available instead of households _with_ broadband? I find it very difficult to believe that it is the latter.

[totter]

More info at CNN: [cnn.com...]

I think it depends on where you are located at. I live in small rural community. In the church I belong, only about 30-40% have internet access, and about 90% of those have it because it is cheaper than a phone bill.
It just isn't that important to most around here.

[Rosalind]

I think the key figure is the 39% that have it at home, not that 55% have it at home OR work. It's still not the majority, and those who surf from work connections may be quite restricted in what they can look at and the time they can spend.

I couldn't find any mention of midband connections. I've seen speeds as low as 2x dial-up advertised as broadband, and there are quite a few packages around at 256K. So broadband isn't always what it seems.

I still use a dial-up connection, because I want to experience the same internet speeds as most of my visitors. Too many developers make the mistake of assuming that everyone has a connection as fast as they do, and creating beautiful multimedia experiences that take forever to load.

The other obstacle to creating broadband content is the cost of bandwidth. If this falls in future, thanks to economies of scale, we'll probably see a much more interesting internet. So I won't be creating much rich broadband content until the majority have true broadband connections, *and* the price of bandwidth makes it viable.

[victor]

The important questions are:

Do they have broadband for all their connections? I got access to BB at work, but not at home. I do most of my buying from home, so a BB-only-friendly site gets no revenue from me.

What proportion of your users access via BB? You could lose way more than 50% of visitors if you make the wrong guess.

[ControlEngineer]

Most of my readers (of content pages) and customers (of downloadable eBooks and spreadsheets) access my site from work (yes, they are working, my stuff is information for control engineers). However, I still have customers and readers (readers bring money due to adsense) who use dial up. These are people who need to get information about work related subjects from home or while traveling.

Hotel switchboards often result in a 50% or more decrease in speed. 19K (average) is not unusual in a large hotel (the larger the slower). As for hotels with broadband, they are few and many people just don't have the time while on the road to get it turned on. [having to deal with the front desk, etc.].

So even for business customers, a significant number are using a slow connection. Also, when on the road and pressed for time, slow seems even slower. (particularly when one has to get some work done before leaving for the airport in rush hour traffic).