Dial-Up Users "Don't Want Broadband" 593
Barence writes "The majority of dial-up Internet users say they don't want to upgrade their connection to broadband, according to a new study in the US. The Pew Internet & American Life research found that 62% of dial-up users had no interest in upgrading to a high-speed connection." (CNN is carrying the AP's story on the study, too.)
I was thinking the same thing (Score:2, Informative)
And it wasn't that long ago that we did everything over dialup. Even expensive things like ISDN were just 2 64k channels. Barely better than dial-up.
And we managed to communicate, download binaries, mp3s, game, pass through uucp and email on uunet and such on pep modems, ISDN, and slower links.
To this day, about the only thing that crushes dialup are DVD downloads, and some dev apps and games that have become as big as DVDs.
Re:$12 a month versus $50 a month (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dialup is "good enough" if you're not an addict (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Need (Score:5, Informative)
If we could dump all the extra garbage on most webpages, we could conserve a lot of bandwidth as it is.
Edit -> Preferences -> Content
Untick load images automatically.
Untick enable Javascript.
Untick enable Java.
Edit -> Preferences -> Applications
Remove any you don't like.
HTH
Re:well duh (Score:2, Informative)
And most places you only get that lovely $15/mo DSL if you pay for the $23/mo phone line... Naked DSL has a tendency of being a bit more costly.
Re:Interestingly... (Score:1, Informative)
How can you compare a percentage (something out of 100) and an age (a time measurement) and call them "identical" to one-another?
Apples and oranges.
Re:T1 (Score:2, Informative)
While the availability of T1 lines is pretty much universal, the cost will typically price that mode of connection out of the majority of dialup users ballpark.
Re:Nooo! (Score:4, Informative)
At least one neighborhood in Queens, NY just got broadband within the last year. I don't know where people get the idea that the whole country is wired. Much of the country doesn't even have cable. And most is too rural to get DSL or FIOS.
Re:Nooo! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pleeeeease keep them on dial up! (Score:5, Informative)
They don't make very effective bots, but they still get botted.
I was checking my mother-in-law's computer because she said the internet wasn't working. I connected and twiddled around with settings a bit. At some point I opened up the connections status and I had to smile a bit as her uploads were something like 5MB and downloads were a few thousand k.
She never patched her system because it takes to long over dialup :) Even antivirus updates are painful.
The other cool thing is that she kept having to unplug the phone line because the computer would dial in whenever it needed a connection, and the bot apparently always needed a connection.
I was one of those (Score:2, Informative)
I was poor in my 20s. I became frugal. Most of my computer use at home was just reading email and reading the web. Dial-up was mostly fine for that.
I switched after having gotten pissed off with the 3rd local phone company I tried. Apparently in the 21st century nobody has the technology to accurately bill people.
I figured out that if I dumped my phone company, dumped my dialup service, got a cable connection for the internet, and used VOIP I would only be paying about $5 - $10 more a month with the new combination of services.
Re:Nooo! (Score:5, Informative)
The US doesn't suck because people choose not to get broadband, it sucks because they can't get it even if they want it.
No, you almost certainly don't. Maybe you think you do, because you have cable or DSL, but those are too slow to count as broadband. The only real broadband in the US (not including business leased lines, of course) is Verizon's FIOS, and that's available in so few areas it might as well be mythical.
Re:Kinda OT: I guess none of them can ever (Score:2, Informative)
Winmodems are indeed a pain when not using Windows.
Until rather recently I was on dial-up, and ended up getting this [newegg.com] dial-up modem. It works like most routers/modems; you connect your machines to it via Ethernet and control it via its internal web server, so any OS that has a web browser can use it. Dialing out and hanging up can be automated by URL parameters sent to its web page, so with a tiny bit of programming you can make a command-line modem control program. My Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows, and Linux machines all work very well with it.
If you're on dial-up, the $50 or so for such a modem is well worth it if you're interested in using non-Windows OSes.
Broadband is for advertising (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nooo! (Score:3, Informative)
The FCC currently defines broadband as 768Kbps or faster [engadget.com]. So even if he has a 512K ADSL line, he's still not on broadband. And I'd agree with him that much of the "broadband" in the US really shouldn't be called that, especially compared to the baseline connections in the rest of the developed world.
Calling someone a troll when you're so woefully misinformed only makes you look stupid and mean.
"Are we there yet?" (Score:3, Informative)
those unpatched systems don't need much bandwidth to send lots of two line text-only spam.
Automatic Updates downloads patches in the background.
Automatic Updates downloads service packs in the background
"We'll get there when we get there." The service works just fine whether you have dial-up or broadband.
This is not headline news.
If you have the patience of a ten year old, you can order Windows XP Service Pack 3 [microsoft.com] on CD-ROM from Microsoft for $3.99. The CD-ROM is currently available in nineteen languages and dialects.
Say! Slashdot's faster! (Score:3, Informative)
I just undid automatic images, JavaScript and java, and Slashdot loads fast. Props for Slashdot webmasters who still make it look good without JavaScript or images.
What The Hell Is Microsoft BITS? (Score:4, Informative)
From 2005, "The Reader's Digest" version of how it works:
BITS is a cool new file transfer feature of Windows that asynchronously downloads files from a remote server over HTTP. BITS can manage multiple downloads from multiple users while making use of idle bandwidth exclusively. Although the use of BITS is not limited to auto-updating applications, it is the underlying API used by Windows Update. And since it is available to any application, it can be used to do much of the really tough work involved in creating an auto-updating application.
Here is the basic idea. An application asks BITS to manage the download of a file or set of files. BITS adds the job to its queue and associates the job with the user context under which the application is running. As long as the user is logged on, BITS will drizzle the files across the network using idle bandwidth. In fact, the code-name for the BITS technology is Drizzle, which, it turns out, is quite descriptive of what BITS does.
How does all of this work? The technology is actually fairly sophisticated. First, BITS is implemented as a Windows service that maintains a collection of jobs organized into a set of priority queues: foreground, high, normal, and low. Each job in the same priority level is given bandwidth via time slices of about five minutes, in a round-robin fashion. Once there are no jobs remaining in a queue, the next priority queue is inspected for jobs.
Jobs in the foreground queue use as much network bandwidth as they can, and for this reason the foreground priority should only be used by code that is responding to a user request. The remaining priorities, high, normal, and low, are much more interesting because they are all background priorities, which is to say that they only make use of network bandwidth that's not in use.
To achieve this background feature, BITS monitors network packets and disregards packets that it recognizes as its own. The remaining packets are considered the active load on the machine's bandwidth. BITS uses the active load information along with the connection speed and some other statistics to decide whether it should continue downloading files or back off in order to increase throughput for the active user. Because of this, the user doesn't experience bandwidth problems.
The ability to drop what it is doing at a moment's notice is very important for BITS. In many cases, only part of a file is downloaded before BITS must give up the network or even lose connection altogether. The partially downloaded file is saved, however, and when BITS gets another crack at the network, it picks up where it left off. This ability to recover does have some side effects.
Remember that BITS is used to transfer files from HTTP servers. A server should be HTTP 1.1-compliant or at least support the Range header in the GET method for BITS to work. This is because BITS needs to be able to request a portion of a file. In addition, the content being downloaded must be static content such as a markup file, code file, bitmap, or sound. A GET request including a Range header makes no sense when requesting dynamic content such as that produced by CGI, ISAPI, or ASP.NET.
Currently, there are two versions of BITS: 1.0 and 1.5. BITS 1.0 ships with Windows XP and has the following features: interruptible background downloading of files, download prioritization, optional notification of completed jobs and error situations, and optional progress notifications for use with dialog boxes and other UI elements. BITS 1.5 ships with Windows .NET Server. In addition to the features contained in BITS 1.0, version 1.5 has interruptible background uploading of files and authenticated connections using Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate (Kerberos) or Passport. BITS 1.5 is available as a redistributable that is compatible with Windows 2000 and greater (see Background Intelligent Transfer Ser
Late comer to the party (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Kinda OT: I guess none of them can ever use lin (Score:1, Informative)
I was under the impression that a number of winmodems were supported. Did you actually check if it was supported or not, if you didn't maybe you would like to check here [linmodems.org]