Quote:
Originally Posted by
Perderabo
Does anyone still use modems for anything? Every now and then I see a web site that offers low res video for dial-up users. I wonder if any dial-up users still exist.
There are lots and lots and
lots of dialup users in this province.
Every couple years, this province puts forth an initiative to get broadband to
everyone in the province and sells the project to the lowest bidder -- who invariably chickens out and decides we must have meant "only in places of highest density", then puts up another damned cellphone tower. There are and continue to be communities that can't even get dialup -- local-only phone service unless you call collect. It's also a convenient moneygrab for the dominant provider, cellphone access internet allows them to charge by-the-meg once you go over a tiny limit. It's even worse in Manitoba, where there's huge dead areas without proper high speed or cellphone coverage at all.
Not that I don't appreciate sites optimized for low bandwidth just 'cause I have high speed. Low-bandwidth sites load faaaaast, and just having bandwidth available doesn't mean I need to bleed it from every pore. Multi-megaton Windows, Mcaffee, Norton, and Itunes updates are more than willing to consume all that bandwidth for you these days before you even open a web browser, and people are feeling the crunch due to new bandwidth laws and such, not just here but in a few places. And on days when our "high speed" is working slow (increasingly many), they
still load fast.
I've also seen people occasionally using free-to-air internet in some places, and from seeing how that works, it appears to be some strange sort of
wireless dialup. Whatever will they think of next?