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A recent post on another thread got me curious as to how many people actually still use dial-up connections. I live in a small town in Panama, up in the hills, and even I have high speed internet. So what do you use/have???
I, being a technophile, have had high speed internet since 1999. Back then, less than 1% of the population had it.
I got ya one-upped. I had cable Internet in '98. I moved to West L.A. (instead of somewhere else - I was moving no matter what) specifically because that was where Cox Cable was testing their service, before rolling it out to their entire customer base.
Prior to that, I was a sysop on a BBS that had a fractional T1 (as well as dial-up), and before the T1 was installed, it was net-connected via a 56k FRAD.
I think the OP should probably take into account the that majority of people visiting this forum are technophiles, so the response the the poll is going to be skewed.
I think the OP should probably take into account the that majority of people visiting this forum are technophiles, so the response the the poll is going to be skewed.
Oh I agree - but if I posted anywhere else I'd probably have it moved. If anyone can think of someplace else where it will 'stay', I'm open to suggestions I'm just trying to essentially make a point that the percentage of people who are actually still using dial up connections is like 1 in 1,000,000 lol
People in some rural areas still have no choice in the matter - dial-up is their only option. The number of those areas is dwindling, but they still exist. Fixed point-to-point wireless is growing in availability - I was going to move cross-country some 5 or 6 years ago to work for a startup doing that - as is WiMax. DSL is limited in how far away you can be from the PoP, and cable doesn't exist everywhere. Oh, and satellite internet just plain sucks.
Also, dial-up is used by people that travel a lot, as it's sometimes the only sure-fire way to get online.
I got cable internet in 98. The local cable company put a little one sentence statement in the paper looking for beta testers for cable broadband.
I think it was 500K down, and 100, or 150K up. There were no consumer routers at the time, but I found some software that shared an internet connection with a single NIC, basically did what ICS that came out as part of Windows 98SE did. I had been using it even with dial up, as I had networked my computers with 10Base2
Also, dial-up is used by people that travel a lot, as it's sometimes the only sure-fire way to get online.
And dial up will still work in a power outage(at least until your laptop battery dies anyway).
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