Making do with dial-up Internet access
Higher cost and technology aversion make many
resist broadband.
High-speed Internet access is being adopted as
quickly as any modern technology has ever been, including
television. So what makes Dana Jenkins think she can resist this
trend?.
She is one of the tens of millions of Americans
seemingly immune to the lure of more speed and satisfied with
dial-up services. In fact, she is in the majority. Most
Americans who surf the Internet do so by dialing in on regular
telephone lines, despite the rapidly narrowing price gap between
high-speed and dial-up connections..
People like Jenkins are neither Luddites nor
laggards, but practical consumers content to pay for a service
that is less than optimal, and at times even frustratingly slow,
because they say greater speed is not worth the trouble of
starting over with a new telecommunications provider and getting
a new e-mail address, even if the added cost is small..
"I resent it," said Jenkins, 61, an avid Internet
user in Marietta, Georgia, of the mild pressure she feels to get
a high-speed connection. She pays $21.95 a month to dial into
the Net - mostly to do research for the doctorate in
communications that she is working toward - and said paying even
$10 more for a faster connection would feel wasteful..
"I don't do gaming. I don't download a lot of
graphics," she said. "For the money I would spend, I don't need
it.".
Up to now, the market for high-speed connections
has been dominated by the young, educated, affluent and
tech-savvy. In some circles, it is considered not just
functional but an essential bit of modernity, like knowing what
happened on the television drama "The Sopranos" or that Diesel
refers to jeans, not fuel. Some dial-up users admit they avoid
admitting their low network speeds to their better-connected
friends..
The situation is likely to change as more users
move to broadband. In 2003, 23 million households had high-speed
access, up from 16 million the year before, according to Yankee
Group, a research firm. In 2003, 51 million U.S. households
connected to the Web through a dial-up connection, down from 55
million a year before..
A typical dial-up connection delivers information
at 56 kilobytes per second; broadband connections are as much as
25 times faster..
In practical terms, the performance depends
largely on what task a person is doing. E-mail, for example, can
take around about the same amount of time to download. But
high-speed connections can make a huge difference for the
digital transfer of graphics, elaborate Web pages and video..
While many dial-up users cite cost as one reason
to stick with their existing service, the high-speed service is
becoming more affordable..
Dial-up costs can range from $10 a month from
discount companies to $21.95 a month for services from big
operators like EarthLink and MSN..
Cable modem service costs $40 to $45 a month,
according to Yankee Group. Telephone digital subscriber line
service can cost $35 a month, but the price typically drops to
$30 a month if users also buy long-distance and local phone
service from the same phone company..
The industry already has a label for people who
have not yet moved into the fast lane: prime prospects. Verizon
Communications, the largest U.S. telephone company, has begun a
marketing campaign to convince consumers that high-speed access
is affordable and trouble-free to set up..
"There's a mind-set that broadband is hard to
install and complex," said John Wimsatt, vice president of
broadband marketing for Verizon. Noting that some consumers will
always be wary of new technology, he pointed out that "some
people still have their VCRs flashing 12 o'clock."
