Techdirt: Dial-Up: Dead Or Alive?
Techdirt: Dial-Up: Dead Or Alive?: the bigger question is: do dial-up users, those hold-outs, even matter? What percentage of Internet commerce is instigated and completed by dial-up modem users? Are they even at the tail of the log-curve, or not even consequential at all in the greater scheme of web-economics? I redid our streaming-media specs to eliminate dial-up. I see 90% broadband use across our sites.
I’d have to go looking for any updates but the last stats I saw (about 2 months ago were that of the worldwide internet users (only about 15% of the world population) some 75-80% still used dial-up.
This is for various reasons such low cost, unavailability of broadband, cost of broadband. While many places have high penetration of brodband services, and in some cases cheap rates, that penetration is by no means as deep as the providers would have us think.
As to site stats those can be influence by many things. One of the most obvious is – does your content cater to material of primary interest to the average broadband user rather than the general user? Is the site media rich or slow and time consuming to use for someone on dial-up (which means they stop visiting and work gets around that it’s a slow site so fewer others on dial-up don’t visit).
There is a lot of life left in dial-up and it will be around a long time so long as some providers insist on gouging level priice for broadband in some markets. In other regions it’s simply a matter of access. Since the cost to provide, or number of customers is too low, some regions are ignored by most providers.
WD Milner: Well put! Your part on the statistics is just what I was going to mention!
Regarding availability; I’m in living in Minnesota, USA which is a pretty rural state. I’m in one of the more populace areas and we only have two broadband (one in most cases) providers to choose from. That’s pretty slim pickins. Especially when you consider the above Milner’s price gouging comment, it’s real and it happens all the time out here. There’s a particular friend of mine whose only broadband option is DSL at $80/m.
If you travel fifteen minutes away from this particular town, you reach a black hole. Dial-up is the only available service. So, it’s not just parts of rural China and South Africa that are lacking broadband access – it’s also parts of the United States.