[suvsr4terrorists]

Just wondering....

[goMac]

Originally Posted by suvsr4terrorists

Just wondering....

Me!

[Kvasir]

A survey last year by SG Cowen indicated about 52% of all households that had an internet service used dialup. That number is expected to drop to about 40% by the end of this year (note that that is still a LOT of homes using dialup). A JD Powers and Assoc. article last year also made note of the fact that for many of the dialup users, that is their only solution (other then horribly expensive satellite service).

I live in Charlottesville Virginia, and all you need do is drive less then a mile west of the city limits, and there's no DSL, no cable broadband, nothing but a phone line to use. Much of the outer banks is just now getting cable broadband (I have friends who own beach houses).

Dialup is not nearly as rare as long term users of broadband think.

P.S. The SG Cowen survey was just for the USA - I don't know about other countries.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

You could have made this a poll.

Broadband here has always been rather available and cheap up here. I have had it for 6 years for fast speeds with no caps and it never cost over $30 US. It's rather odd as so much of Canada is unpopulated yet they still seem to have broadband and cellphone service.

"Canada has one of the best-developed national broadband infrastructures in the world, using a range of network architectures and technologies. It has achieved the highest overall broadband penetration of the Group of Seven industrialised countries. At the end of 2004, Canada was placed 10th in the world for DSL broadband subscribers. Broadband deployment continues to progress under active government encouragement, with 85% of Canadians now living in communities served by high-speed Internet access."

http://www.budde.com.au/Reports/Cont...tics-2900.html

[tooki]

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

You could have made this a poll.

Fixinated™.

tooki

[willed]

I'm on the über-fast University Network still for now, but am leaving here forever on Sunday Next year I'll probably be back on dial-up.

[sek929]

Dial up is goddamn sham too. At my house with my roomates we all have cellphones. Cable is waaaay to much money but also if we wanted Dial up we would have to get a 29$ phone line, plus the cost of the internet service itself.

Friggin' ridiculous, might as well launch our own satellite into space.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

ISDN?? Does anyone still offer that? How did that work anyway?


I looked into it back in 97 and it was rather expensive.

[sek929]

ISDN is like DSL but you need a dedicated phone line for it right? Last I checked it was far to expensive.

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

ISDN?? Does anyone still offer that? How did that work anyway?

It's a digital line. Been around since the 60s, actually. BRI uses 3 channels for up to 64Kb/sec. You can get a "dual channel" (6 channels) for 128Kb/sec.

In Britain it goes up to 1.3Mb/sec with 30 channels.

I'm not sure if it's just a single T-carrier channel or if it's its own thing. Either way, it's really expensive.

[Ke^in]

I haven't had dialup since 1998.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

My boyfriend has satellite access and he hates it. It has quite the lag and it STILL ties up the phone line.

[Ke^in]

I had wireless back in 99. It used radio waves. Like pagers work.

It was really fast. Had no caps either way.

Then people started abusing it and the capped it.

A new admin took over and screwed it all up. I worked at the ISP doing web pages for awhile.

I switched to cable soon after.

[tooki]

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

ISDN?? Does anyone still offer that? How did that work anyway?

I looked into it back in 97 and it was rather expensive.

ISDN is a digital phone line. ISDN always comes in pairs ("channels"), each line carrying 64Kbps, but with much lower latency than a 56K modem.

ISDN has always been very expensive in the U.S., but in Europe, it is widespread and basically the same cost as analog lines. (In Switzerland, for example, basic ISDN costs the same as two analog lines, but gives you 3 phone numbers, any two of which can be in use simultaneously.)

tooki

[Doofy]

Is ISDN widely available in the US for rural areas?

And can it, as in the UK, be had with a fixed IP?

(I'm on 512 kbps ADSL, BTW. If I was a couple of hundred yards north I'd have to get ISDN as I'm at ADSL line-length limit).

[FulcrumPilot]

Originally Posted by tooki

ISDN is a digital phone line. ISDN always comes in pairs ("channels"), each line carrying 64Kbps, but with much lower latency than a 56K modem.

ISDN has always been very expensive in the U.S., but in Europe, it is widespread and basically the same cost as analog lines. (In Switzerland, for example, basic ISDN costs the same as two analog lines, but gives you 3 phone numbers, any two of which can be in use simultaneously.)

tooki

Whoa! tooki! I know some babes that are easy to ask out for dates with that kind of in depth knowledge! Can you lend me your brain for a few days?

[Sage]

I'm on dialup – not out of want, but simply because we can't get cable or DSL up here (and to hell with satellite!). We live disconnected from the electrical grid and water lines though, so I'm a little surprised we even have phone lines.

[Kvasir]

Originally Posted by Doofy

Is ISDN widely available in the US for rural areas?

And can it, as in the UK, be had with a fixed IP?

(I'm on 512 kbps ADSL, BTW. If I was a couple of hundred yards north I'd have to get ISDN as I'm at ADSL line-length limit).

Don't know about the fixed IP, but ISDN is available widely in the USA, in major urban areas (not necessarily B-ISDN). It does suffer from the same limitations as DSL - that is, you need to be within 18,000ft of the switch (DSLAM for DSL). So, just like DSL, it ain't widely available in rural areas.

When I first moved to Charlottesville (VA) in 2000, ISDN was my only choice, but was hugely expensive. Sprint kept promising DSL "any day" now for over 3 years, and Adelphia still hasen't extended out to my neighborhood. Finally, a couple of years ago, Sprint downsized, fired a bunch of folks - notably the telephone tech support people for one of the eastern regional service centres just down the road (moved everything to the mid-west). That left a Sprint owned building and property vacant, so they've since plunked some DSLAMs in there, and so I finally got DSL (I was, literally, according to the local service guys, the first subscriber on that system). I currently have 3MB dedicated DSL, and get good speeds since I'm only about 3,500ft from the actual DSLAM, But even in 2000, most folks in my neighborhood were on dialup (with UVa only 20 minutes away).

[Doofy]

Originally Posted by Kvasir

Don't know about the fixed IP, but ISDN is available widely in the USA, in major urban areas (not necessarily B-ISDN). It does suffer from the same limitations as DSL - that is, you need to be within 18,000ft of the switch (DSLAM for DSL). So, just like DSL, it ain't widely available in rural areas.

Thanks.

[JoshuaZ]

Cable internet rocks my world.

[Kenneth]

Comcast Cable here.. but thinking about switching back to DSL.

[sek929]

Comcast's speed is amazing at times but the connection is unreliable.

[sminch]

ain't nothing wrong with dialup (except when you want to download anything bigger than a few hundred k, but how often do you want to do that!?).

hey, i'm cheap. and patient.

sminch

[sek929]

Originally Posted by sminch

ain't nothing wrong with dialup (except when you want to download anything bigger than a few hundred k, but how often do you want to do that!?).

Currently downloading five files at 115MB each....

So basically all the time

[tooki]

Originally Posted by sek929

Comcast's speed is amazing at times but the connection is unreliable.

That was my experience. It went down for a day every month.

I went back to DSL.

tooki

[sek929]

Originally Posted by tooki

That was my experience. It went down for a day every month.

I went back to DSL.

tooki

My parents put up with the same crap.

And then I get a call from my confused Father telling me that Internet Explorer doesn't work...

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

My DSL goes down for a few hours MAYBE once every year or two.

[tooki]

Mine has been great -- a few minutes of unscheduled downtime per year, and maaaybe 30 mins of scheduled, announced-in-advance maintenance downtime per year.

tooki

[mitchell_pgh]

Originally Posted by tooki

That was my experience. It went down for a day every month.

I went back to DSL.

tooki

That's what I have here... great when it is working... but it does go down from time to time...

[ghporter]

SBC DSL for me. I've used it since around 2000, and I love it. The one drawback is that it's through megaconglomerate SBC-and living in the city they have their "headquarters" in is NOT a helpful thing. SBC is so huge that two offices next to each other probably don't even know they are both part of SBC. So when you call about something-like changing service plans-you could easily break everything. I move carefully with this service, like I'm on a rickety bridge. The service itself has been rock solid (new cable and a new house help, but the "head end" has been great too), but the business stuff scares me.

[Kvasir]

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

My DSL goes down for a few hours MAYBE once every year or two.

The only major Sprint DSL outage I've had was Hurricane Isabel, a short while after I signed up (understable - everything was out for a few days - power, phone, and a lot of roads too ) Since then it's been down all of a few hours, total, and once was Earthlink's issues, not Sprint's. I usually get very near my subscribed speed (3M down, 768K up), and at off-peak times often exceed my download speed (overall, much better than my friends with Adelphia). So I pretty much have 24/7 uptime with no issues I'd complain about (while local Adelphia users seem to constantly complain about slow downs and prolonged outages).

[jasonsRX7]

Originally Posted by sek929

ISDN is like DSL but you need a dedicated phone line for it right? Last I checked it was far to expensive.

I had ISDN at home back in '98. Thru Sprint, it was around $90 a month.

Edit: And that was just for the line. If I hadn't been working at an ISP at the time, I would have had to pay for the internet access as well.

[suvsr4terrorists]

Originally Posted by sminch

ain't nothing wrong with dialup (except when you want to download anything bigger than a few hundred k, but how often do you want to do that!?).

hey, i'm cheap. and patient.

sminch

Except that in order to use dialup, you need a phone line ($30 a month). Then throw on your dialup service (15-20 a month), and you're up to 50ish. For $5 more you could have yahoo dsl.

[jasonsRX7]

Originally Posted by sminch

(except when you want to download anything bigger than a few hundred k, but how often do you want to do that!?)

Every single day, multiple times a day. It's rare that I move less than 1gb of traffic in a day.

[as2]

Personal connection is 2MB ADSL

Although I use a 56k connection to dial into my company's secure network.