Originally posted by jethroted
It's the only way we can get rid of people logging on with "your file sharring app" and taking 4 hours to dl a 1 meg file. RIP dial-up!
All right. First off, it does not take 4 hours (i.e. 240 minutes) to download 1000K of information. On 28.8Kbps modems, it takes roughly 20 minutes or less. On 56K, it takes roughly 10 minutes or less. If it really takes 4 hours, then you have some serious ISP or modem issues.
Second, I have lived with various speeds of dial-up for about
10 years now. I say modem issues in the previous paragraph, because not all third-party modems work right. One of our external modems for our first few years of dial-up access (early or mid 90s) was expensive, slow, and unreliable.
Third, another thing to consider is the amount of traffic in your area. It doesn't matter if you have dial-up, cable, dsl, or T#. The more traffic and/or the farther you are from a phone box (or whatever it's termed), the slower your connections flow. If you have to connect through dial-up in a public area within a city, expect bogs.
Fourth, if it takes that long to download something from a P2P app, try another host or client. Most often, if the host is extremely busy, you will have connection bogs. If you have something faster than dial-up, you will experience connection bogs to the host as well, but since you connect faster than those with dial-up, if I am not mistaken, you still have greater speeds than dial-up to a similar ratio as compared to when you had maximum speeds with either.
>(Shrek) It is my prediction that by the year 2010 all computers will come standard with internal cable, DSL, or satellite modems.
If that is true, then I'm quite certain there will be a few people rather upset about not having an internal dial-up for either portability, basic and affordable internet access, or being able to access the internet, period. By a few people, I mean somewhere around a few million people.
Not everyone lives in the bliss of high-speed modems and connections, and not everyone
must have something faster than dial-up. Yes it is slow, but it is still effective. With a decent P2P connection, you can download a 40MB file in a few hours. And if that is "too long", I'm sure you can find something to do in the meantime until the download is finished.
When iMovie 3 came out (ignore the loading times issue, this is for an example), it was over 80MB. Even with Cable or faster, it takes a while, possibly 30 minutes or an hour, depending on your connection. On dial-up, it may take between 5 and 10 hours. I'm sure you don't sit and stare at your progress bar for 30 minutes until the download is finished.
In response to the prediction itself, I don't feel Shrek's prediction is right or wrong, I feel that IF dial-up modems and/or dial-up access are banned, there will be some very pissed people.
Even if 0.1 percent of America uses dial-up, that accounts for 300,000 people in the country, and (taking a guess) maybe 50,000 of those people would suddenly not be able to use internet access.
The only way I see the removal of dial-up a plus is if the price of cable comes down significantly and is available for the remaining percentage, as Shrek mentioned. And it is that factor, in which predictions are more important, whether they are right or wrong.
