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NEW YORK, Aug. 18 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Nielsen/NetRatings (Nasdaq: NTRT - News), the global standard for Internet audience measurement and analysis, reported that broadband connections for the first time reached 51 percent of the American online population at-home during the month of July, as compared to 38 percent last July.
U.S. Broadband Connections Reach Critical Mass [biz.yahoo.com]
I remember the 56k internet... man we've come a long way from those days! I remember how neat it was if a site had some clipart on it. I like watching old TV shows where they are using the internet from an old Packard Bell, or IBM using a US Robotics 28.8 or 56k modem. I remember when I got my first 36.6 modem. None of my friends could believe how fast it was... Now I'm spoiled by my load balanced T1s.
Soon fiber will be everywhere and the only thing slowing down the web will be server / client speed!
U.S. telecom companies have balked at the cost of installing additional "in-ground" facilities for all but the most densely-populated areas. Just as eastern Europe and Asia bypassed improvements to their wired telecom infrastructure, the global trend is to avoid having to dig trenches and lay cables whenever possible -- It is prohibitively expensive due to labor costs, insurance against damage to other utilities, and costs associated with right-of-way negotiations. In-ground simply doesn't make economic sense, except in geographically small areas where population density is very high, and provisions are already in place to allow easy expansion and/or upgrading of infrastructure -- Think very big cities with pre-exisiting underground "cable ways."
I'll put my money on cellular and LMDS/MMDS (local microwave distribution) solutions going forward. Based on that and on existing cable/DSL solutions, look for a period (say five years) of 'average' bandwidth limits hovering between 0.5-5Mbps until "the next big thing" arrives. This also assumes that the equipment and connections between ISPs and hosts does not become the bottleneck -- If the network itself doesn't keep up, then the "last mile" may no longer be the bottleneck.
Of course, broadband is still an order of magnitude improvement over 56k, and this news is wonderful!
Jim
This in my view nearly negates effect of broadband as far as normal web pages are concerned as people still want to retain fast browsing file downloading newest song "Widget".
Also adding more content (as opposed to flashy design) to the same page might be taken lightly by the search engines. As you probably know indexing terabytes of data puts incredible pressure to make assumptions to cut down size of index by every bit possible.
So, if you look at Google's original design you will see that they count positions up to 4095, after that they assume position 4096, this should affect proximity calculations, unless they of course changed this assumption.
Soon fiber will be everywhere
We didn't get phone service until 1992, and then only as the result of a class-action suit. I think there will be a lot of rural places that won't be seeing broadband for a while. Granted, it's a small percentage of the population, but until then we'll be paying $150/mo to get 256KB....
I'm so far from being an analyst in this area, but here are some guesses (keep your salt shaker handy)...
I would suspect that the reasons are a combination of reasons similar to those that explain why the US lags many other countries in cell phone technology and mass transit.
population density It's no surprise that Korea, where most people live in apartment buildings, is way out ahead of the US. Name another laggard among developed nations. And the answer is? Australia. Same reason. It costs a lot of money to bring wires out to regions like the one I live in and, once you run the wires the 20 miles from the nearest hub, you only sign up five customers, so why bother? This is a major reason why mass transit will never work in the US like it does in denser nations (and I'm a tree hugger who wishes it were otherwise, but it isn't). Aside from Manhattan and a few places like that, even most US urban centers don't have close to the population density of the average European or Asian urban center.
infrastructure age In the time between the initial build-out of the US cell phone system and the time of the initial build-out of the European system, many advances were made. Europeans were able to benefit from the American experiment before investing in the technology. I think some of that holds true for internet infrastructure. We were first in implementation, which makes us last in technology. It's hard to get companies to invest when you have an infrastructure that still works sort of and still hasn't paid for itself (that's more or less a guess).
One last possible factor (again, just a guess) is that there's no money to made in transmission. That's why the power grid had the massive failure a while back. It's antiquated, but all the money is made in generating and selling electricity, not in transmission. I suspect that a similar situation applies with data transmission.
While to me, the pop. density is an obvious contributing factor, I hadn't heard the 'infrastructure first' reasoning before. It does make a lot of sense.
I am fortunate. Rural location. Great local telephone cooprative. They just got done laying fiber out at the road. I am about 300 feet from having fiber to my front door, and exspect that to happen by spring.
I am a believer in cooperatives. Profits being used to improve service to the members is a lot better than profits being used to enrich some shareholder a thousand miles away.
WBF
also NZ is the 2nd from the bottom of the uptake in broadband.
your luckey!
anyway asian countrys are upgrading to 100meg!
dreams..
but hey by 2012 NZ will have VDSL / Fibre to cabnet wich is sweet!
