Couple Builds New Home Just For Broadband > Can't rely on Big Business or Big Government

said by joquarky:

Dial-up is no longer sufficient for normal internet access. The web is not optimized for dial-up users anymore and our society is starting to assume the ubiquity of broadband internet access the same way people assumed everyone had a phone line a couple decades ago.

I spend my weekends with family who can not get broadband internet access. I can tell you from personal experience that a lack of broadband internet access is like living a decade in the past. In some respects it's even worse, because at least in the 90s, websites were designed for a dialup majority.

Here are some examples of home life without broadband:

• You can't practically use any video sites (youtube, streaming Netflix, etc). One of the cultural consequences of this is that this part of my family misses out on a lot of the popular jokes that get around these days (and even make it onto TV programs, but without any background explanation).



• You can't enjoy the benefits of taking an online university class, since most require a broadband connection. This has caused a problem for at least one family member where the class was only offered online.



• It takes at least 15 minutes (although more like a half hour) just to navigate an online store, view zoomed images, read reviews, download samples, and check out.



• Sites which use AJAX functions assume everyone has broadband, which means they fail to provide proper feedback (e.g., "Please Wait") during an asynchronous request, causing Javascript errors or other problems navigating the site.



• You can't just "hop on and look up something real quick". It is far faster to pull out an old encyclopedia off their bookshelf and search for an article than to wait for the dial-up connection to synchronize and then pulling up a search on Wikipedia. On top of that, you're lucky if a dead tree encyclopedia even has the article you're interested in.



• Checking email is a much more tedious ordeal; dial-up users will check their email much less frequently than broadband users, and will generally not be "around" for IM communications. My family treats checking email more like a chore than a communications medium, due to the time needed to connect and wait for pages to load.



• Magazines are still more convenient than keeping up to date on topics of interest via the web on dial-up



• While out of the house, you can't connect back home to manage a home network or home automation, check your security system, remotely control your PC, watch a slingbox, etc.



• You can't play 95% of online games. Forget anything multiplayer on the Xbox or PS3.

I think people who have become accustomed to broadband forget just how much slower dial-up is. Not only that, but these days most everything has been built up on the internet to assume everybody has broadband, making it even worse now than before.

Part of the extra fees that telcos collected in the 90s was supposed to provide the funds to expand broadband infrastructure to everybody. That never panned out, but the telcos got to keep the $200 billion in extra fees that they were allowed to collect during that time.

It's easy for people who already have broadband to sit back and not care, but there are still a lot people out there who never got what they paid for, and the majority with broadband have no interest in petitioning along with them. When I see the kind of indignation from the above quote, it tells me that this is unlikely to change any time soon.