After Web Blew Up, Shift To Broadband Quietly Went On
from the so-what? dept
In the boom years there were all these startups that were trying to develop "broadband content". All of them failed miserably (and often, spectacularly). In the past couple years, though, it seems that people kept signing up for broadband - even without all that specially designed content. That's making the early believers sit up and start planning new broadband content. Of course, they're all planning to charge for this "premium" content, which (once again) suggests a general misunderstanding of how the internet works. The internet is still about communication and information - and not so much about entertainment. However, the broadband content producers still think of it as an entertainment delivery box, which doesn't mesh with how most people seem to view the internet. It seems unlikely that people will rush to pay to use the internet in a way that doesn't fit with how they use it. People like broadband because it lets them do more communication and get more information without having to deal with the annoying dialup process. They don't do it to be forcefed more TV-style content. That's what TVs are for.
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After last night, I know why
He was still using Internet Explorer 3.0 and it would choke on almost every web page and display a java-script error.
After logging on to the net over his dial-up connection, I spent approx. 20 minutes going through the MS site trying to find IE 5.0, which of course is not any place obvious and IE 6.0 requires Win98 or higher. Once I finally found it and started the download, it took 1 hour and 45 minutes to download.
He is a cable TV subscriber who's paying $20 per month for dial-up service. I told him that for about $10 more he could get a cable modem and we wouldn't have had to wait as long. He asked how long it would have been with a cable modem. I said, "rough guess, 2 minutes at the most". Today he's calling to see about transitioning to cable modem.
People are getting tired of waiting on the internet, whether they're accessing "broadband type" content or not.
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