Statistics (was: Re: 55 minute download

Timo Sund wrote:
>
> Mateo Leyba wrote:
>
> > It is not an "elitist" idea, it's just the way things are going. It is
> > becoming impractical to use the internet with a slow connection.
>

Actually that's only true if you use the newer browsers. I use an
ancient browser that's very fast. I have a newer one on the disk to use
for websites that won't work with the old browser, but it works slower
than the dickens and I refuse to use it except when absolutely
necessary. And even the "newer" one is several versions back.

I deleted Mateo's mail after a brief glance this morning, because I
thought I was done talking about bandwidth and all that. But being a
statistican, numbers interest me and I've been thinking about those
numbers off and on all day.

I've emptied the trash and the archives are behind, so I can't look at
the post again to check the numbers, but the way I remember it, it said
that by a recent estimate, 63 million (people? connections?) were
connected by broadband and 61.3 by narrowband, reflecting a 47% increase
in broadband and a 13% decrease in narrowband from the year before.

If I've got the figures right, that means that over the year there were
20 million more broadband (users, connections, whatever the unit was)
but only 9 million fewer narrowband units. If this is so, then it would
be misleading to attribute the increase, or even half of the increase,
in broadband to people switching from narrowband. I don't know where
those other 11 million came from, but if these numbers are right, they
weren't dialup customers moving up.

This is the kind of thing I think about while driving, sorry about that.
Katharine Thayer
Received on Thu Sep 2 21:42:21 2004