Forum Moderators: phranque
What's clearly missing from the broadband equation is, simply, a reason to use it. Many consumers find dial-up perfectly acceptable for E-mail and Web browsing.
US News & World Report [usnews.com]
Sorry, I run 40+ domains (lost count somewhere around 8,000 pages) and feed a dedicated Sparc Ultra-2 over a dial-up. Works fine.
I want your phone sevice!
if you travel and jack into your email from hotels, you need a dial-up ISP
Actually, many hotels are providing high speed service from the rooms now. The better ones don't even charge for it.
The cheaper ones have you pay $10/day.
Not really, maybe once a month on my primary account. I have 4 other accounts on 2 other ISPs as a backup.
I make money on the web, good money. I spoil myself regularly and spend more on eating out in a day or two than DSL would cost me for the month... I'm not adverse to the cost, I just don't see the value added. All of the arguments above have basically fallen into "you're gonna love it" or "once you've tried it you can't give it up," but you haven't made a convincing argument as to why I might need broadband.
Good point. In fact, the ISP side of my company markets that idea... I just referred a friends union local there; five dialup accounts, one for each of their newly-purchased laptops.
>> You never get dropped?
I don't. Like I said, I stay logged on using dialup for several hours at a time. I used to have trouble, but about a year ago I went outside and ripped out the phone line from the phone company's interface all the way inside my house. Good, solid connections ever since.
That's pretty pricey when you consider a national ISP like earthlink is around $22/mo. Nor do road warriors want to A) worry about which hotel has what, or B) add other charges to their room bill.
how long does it take you to upload a 1mb file?
With our dial up (and yes we do have one for tesing purposes only) it takes 15 minutes. That's 15 minutes in which I could be doing something else.
On cable/dsl 3 minutes tops!
Recently I read -- probably either in InfoWeek or one of the other free magazines that clutter my PO box -- that in the past few months the trend has reversed: some chains are discontinuing broadband availability, and few are planning to add the service. Turns out that people don't really use it, especially at those hotels that do charge for it.
I know one of my site owners is looking into a wireless connection so he can dial up his site while he is on the road.
In fact lets explore that avenue along with this cable/dls versus modem.
I usually connect somewhere around 28 kbps. I run multiple screens and frequently upload/download in background... there is always something else to do. I handle files around 250-400k fairly regularly, above that size much less frequently. If someone were sending me 4 or 5 .doc attachments daily (and I wasn't in a position to be able to nuke them (or their attachments)), I could see a need for broadband.
But even if I sat and simply watched two 15-minute uploads a month, that's $40/hour at a difference of $20/mo for broadband vs dialup.
...And I'm not your average consumer. How many 1mg files does JohnQ handle a month?
Why not use an internet cafe?
Cheaper for access when traveling. Therefore, no requirement for an ISP. :)
Even when it comes, I wouldnt buy it. My lean mean pages dont take too long too upload and I usually stick to close circles online, and wander v.occassionally.
I will definetely be waiting until there is some sort of economy of scale going on...and a better usage of its advantages as highlighted here
That easily serves the need when you are on the road at the hotels.
That argument flew out the window long ago when the broadband companies understood the need for occassional remote service.
lawman
Laptop mobile usage is still increasing in usage, almost the mainstream way of connecting worldwide, and is a long way back from all the new mobile technologies.
As RC says, keep your material lean and mean if you want the great non-North American unwashed like me to use it!
MS with their bundling of Windows XP where the basic version has all the multi media technology, does suggest that broadband's killer application is video. But do we, and business users, really need it? Not really. We get by famously by yahoo messenger and email for quick meetings and decision making on the run. High speed access is really about entertainment, and depends on people wanting badly to access film trailers and the like. At the moment it seems they dont need it.
Secondly history shows that as disk space, memory and speed capabilities increase, applications and services fill up to use it. I havent seen they actually provide functionality or information any better than 10 years ago. They do look prettier.
Anyone remember like me when Wordperfect came on one seven inch floppy and you use another floppy disk to store the documents for a whole book? That's around half a megabyte.
No way i want to use broadband so webdesigners can just provide more graphics, pretty videos, and other stuff to further separate me from content.
No, what it means is we all band together with Flash and Java intesive sites so that people complain about their connection and upgrade. :)
I'm saving lots of money with my broadband connection. For how much I am online, I would have to pay about $600-$900 a month on phone charges.
I imagine you are going to see a surge in broadband users located in developing countries due to the fact that it is much cheaper overall. It has already happened with mobile phones so why not the same with broadband?
Show me a cell phone bill that is less than a land line!
Investors want broadband as it as there is much more profit potential in that than people plugging into phone lines. Until sites that people really need cave in and start building heavy pages that cant be accessed sensibly by a phone line, broadband wont take off.
Just to underline what i said before, it is more difficult than waiting for "developing" countries to "catch up". Ideally iid like to be able to access my same internet content and services whether it is at a duper duper rate at home or at work in US cities, while im travelling and in hotels in Latin America with only a phone line, or at my remote beach location with only rusty old phpne lines. Maybe even by my mobile device in a couple of years.
At the moment i get all i need with dial up, though broadband would be nice. But even then, I probably wont have broadband at home nor on the road. So it still dosent make sense. IId rather have nice text only pages that deliver nicely whatever speed i use. The extent to which people really NEED graphics, and special effects etc, and videos are highly exagerrated to my mind and apply mainly to entertainment uses of the web. And that just isnt happening. When it does happen (eg: downloading spiderman movies or illegal copies of pop tunes via peer to peer), nobody is making any money!
Now people like us that are working on the internet all the time, maybe downloading lots of things at a time and checking email simultaenously, to have broadband is obvious. So im not surprised with the general view here. But the majority of internet users out there are those who connect say 30 mins a day or a couple of days a week. High-usage groups like us are a very small percentage.
..oops.. sorry for the rant.
Several months ago we got DSL and it's like the world went from black and white to color! I can upload and download all day long quick as a bunny rabbit and still surf all those graphic-intense and Flash sites that *I* enjoy.
Lean and mean may make practical sense, but I want some eye candy when it comes to my personal surfing. And eye candy = bandwidth. The fact I can upload and download for biz quickly is just an extra perk that comes with our long-awaited DSL connection.
Go back to slow dialup? Yeah, right!
I do significant amounts of data transfer, and some SE reporting from my connection and would not go back to dialup unless I was being paid to have the modem in the house.
Not sure what the service in the US is like but i have been down less than a couple of times in nearly 3 years! Amazing. Dial up seems to fall on it's ar*s everytime i use it. I fear, however, that when the rest of the country eventualy has the option to switch to BB, it will be as slow as a dial-up or worse. The contention is at the moment 50:1 - or 2k/sec. Lets hope not.
I'm about ready to pull my hair out at this comment. I want to incorporate Flash on my site like it's nobody's business, pretty it up with more graphics, but I can't because I'll get a big pile of emails in my inbox complaining that the pages load too slow. It has to be one of the most infuriating Catch 22s out there for me right now dealing with my site. :(
[reuters.com...]
