How common is broadband service for you?

[Justanotherwargamer]

This is something which I can't claim to have specific all encompassing knowledge of.

I live in central Ontario Canada, and in my experience, people with dial up are rather rare.

Maybe it's similar to how Canadians and Finns make up the world's biggest users of Cell phones.

But when I hear complaints of access to broadband, it always makes me scratch my head. But then, I can't claim to know much about communications services in Europe, or Australia or New Zealand.

I have a friend in New Zealand, and I am told they only have the one company Telecom, a monopoly, making service typically expensive.

I am told ordinary phone usage in Europe can be atrociously expensive, so large lumps of bandwidth usage is not enjoyable.

Meanwhile, I have broadband, and I could be downloading the game non stop 24/7 with no ill effects and no weird expenses at speeds of up to 300k without thinking anything of it.

That's just the norm, and I even live in a small town. Not a major city.

I also ponder on occasion, how many of you on dial up, know another person with broadband (the idea being they are local).

It's just a file download eh, surely you must know at least one broadband equipped local.

[AstroCat]

I don't know anyone anymore with dialup. Even my Mom has broadband.

[Yogi]

Dial-up is quite common in our area for people who live in the countryside. While in most of the cities and villages, high-speed cable and DSL is available, the internet providers (I assume for financial reasons/number of potential subscribers) don't take the cable or DSL to the low populated areas. At the office I have high speed cable, at home I'm stuck with a choice of dial-up providers.

You can try satellite (many complaints about service though) and in some cases some very small wireless providers spring up, but again quality and cost becomes an issue.

In short, unfortunately for quite a few of us the only reasonable choice is dial-up. My dial-up service was pretty good for a number of years, when the local area company merged with Nationwide. Now the service is lousy. Speed slow, but even worse dropped connections occur regularly.

And a real horror story, as I mentioned earlier, I pre-rdered SC2, but won't even bother to attempt to download it, I will be waiting for the hard copy to arrive.

[blackbellamy]

Overall, broadband grew by 2.14 percentage points in February, with 45.15% of Internet-connected U.S. households enjoying a high-speed connection. 54.85% of US home users dial into the Internet with "narrowband" connections of 56Kbps or less. Nearly 75% of U.S. households have Internet access at home, according to a Nielsen//NetRatings survey. The charts below, derived from Nielsen//NetRatings, show trends in connection speeds to the Internet for users in the United States

[TaoJah]

I'm from Flanders, Europe and noone has dial-up here. Our goverment set up a company in the 90's that made a internet cable-connection possible in the whole country. It took three-four years to complete, but by now noone has dial-up unless they want to have it.

[Gérard Le Poer Trench]

As in Belgium and Luxemburg in the Netherlands no dial-up anymore. It is just cheaper to take ADSL or T1 or Cable. In my neighbourghood the fastest connection you can get is 30 mbps Which I of course use.

[Lars]

I've still got dialup because it's about $30 to $40 cheaper than broadband.

Would like broadband, but I just can't justify it for the amount of bandwidth I use. Mostly just sending pbem files at home.

Gimme that case of beer a week instead.

[Yogi]

Just another thought,

Setting up a whole country is certainly nice. In US government isn't going to do it, nor would many want them too. Also, setting up a small populated area is a bit easier than covering thousands of miles many of which are comparitively sparsly populated.

Hopefully DSL and/or cable will be available to my area sooner, rather than later.