40% lack home broadband access [telecom]

1010wins reported:

" Roughly 40 percent of Americans do not have high-speed Internet access at home, according to new Commerce Department figures that underscore the challenges facing policymakers who are trying to bring affordable broadband connections to everyone."

For full article please see:

formatting link

What bothers me is that the techies of the world think everyone has convenient broadband access and design their websites and other services accordingly. For those of us with slow dial-up connections, we must wait and wait until bloated pages slowly unfold before us.

IMHO, much of the stuff on bloated pages is unnecessary. It seems to be more of the web page designer's efforts to show off his knowledge of the latest bells and whistles rather than actually communicating real content.

It doesn't have to be that way. There _are_ plenty of excellent websites that work fine on dial up, so obviously it can be done if the designers choose to.

Obviously the information technology industry is always pushing for faster and more powerful. In this way PCs get obsolete quicker and people must go out and buy ever-more powerful models. It also means users must subscribe to broadband access, making money for the communications carriers.

Reply to
hancock4
Loading thread data ...

There are lots of us who couldn't care less about website glitz. But, we need the speed of broadband to send (and receive from) large files to associates across town or across the country.

Sometimes with dial-up the transfer of large binary files fails after investing an hour, or so, trying to make the upload at 28.8 kb.

***** Moderator's Note *****

These days, most file transfer programs are able to resume a download from the point where it was interrupted. It's a far cry from the agony of seeing the Slackware CD image abort less than 1MB from the end. We're all been there.

Bill Horne Moderator

Reply to
Sam Spade

Yes, and to present the PHBs with whiz-bang eye candy.

There is a single browser feature that would help a great deal, a feature that existed in Netscape Navigator 4.76 but not, AFAIK, in any more up-to-date browser.

If images are disabled, then:

A. Render every image larger than :

  1. As an icon if image size is not given in the
Reply to
Mike Spencer

Mr. Spade makes an excellent point and I have to agree with him. In my humble opinion, a connnection of 56 kb, the max for dial-up, effectively limits a user to a transfer of about 1-2 meg. Anything beyond that leads to errors, retransmissions, or the dreaded cutout / lockout just before the end of the file. Sure, one can successfully transfer larger files, but it takes forever and it's risky.

Of course, 1 meg can represent a pretty good sized spreadsheet or document. But not so much with jpg photographs.

Reply to
hancock4

The "people who matter" probably do. I have the occasional customer with dial-up and they're not the typical consumer of the hotshot websites. Usually they just use their connection for email and can't be bothered with Facebook or other fancy sites.

Reply to
David Kaye

Unfortunately, many websites that wouldn't necessarily be considered "hotshot" are far more bandwidth-intensive than they need to be. I'm thinking about credit-card and banking websites that make me download multiple megabytes of flash, javascript, images, etc to get a statement with information that could just as easily be presented in a couple kilobytes of text.

Reply to
Matt Simpson

Even webmail providers (think gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail) use a lot more glitz than is necessary. Even current Opera (at least as I've got it installed) has trouble enough with hotmail that I'm forced to use IE for that (or to use Thunderbird to POP my new hotmail emails in to me) -- it can get me through the login screen, but draws a blank screen after that.

Cheers, -- tlvp

-- Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP

Reply to
tlvp

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.