cluth
join:2004-01-06
Anchorage, AK | I'm sure all of the reasons quoted above are valid (some can't get it, municipal franchise agreements inhibit competition and access, and some don't want it), but my personal experience has been the latter. My grandfather lives in a well-populated town near Los Angeles with several DSL and cable providers. Non-introductory DSL pricing averages $25-30 per month. He's currently paying $21 per month for AOL. He's only now starting to realize that the Internet is more than just email and checking a few airfares on websites--he just got an iPod, and I coached him through importing his CD collection onto his computer. Normally, iTunes will download the CD track information from CDDB, but since he wasn't connected to AOL, it didn't. I had to have him connect and then reinsert the CD. I told him that, to me, there isn't much of a difference between my computer and the Internet, whether it's my menubar temperature display, accessing files off of my home computer or university-provided file storage space, or whatever. Now that he's realizing this, he's about ready to jump ship from AOL (good thing, no matter how you look at that...). I think as more people realize the usefulness of the Internet and how it's transforming our society (you can't really, say, do anything "constructive" at MySpace over dialup), broadband usage will rise. |
