A Broadband Connection is A Necessity Today
In today?s multimedia, multi-communication world, the need is increasing to have a broadband connection. More and more people are surfing the Net, living and breathing on emails, receiving and sending faxes through this virtual network, managing their family?s memories on digital albums, listening to and streaming music, and even downloading their favorite TV shows for their daily pleasure.
Many of us are interfacing through websites like Facebook, YouTube and MySpace, and rely so much on Internet connectivity that having a fast and reliable ?gateway? to the World Wide Web is a necessity. Ten years ago, there was no such thing as a blog, but these days, more people read blogs than they read the local paper!
Imagine going back several years to the days of slow dialup service. Turning on the computer alone would take a good 5 minutes. Finding an access number to dial into that was not busy and actually stayed connected could be another 15 minutes depending on the time of day.
As content increases to migrate online, people are realizing that they need more bandwidth. Many of us ?connected? people know that broadband (which includes Cable, DSL, and FIOS) is an easy choice over dial-up modems.
Nowadays broadband speeds range upwards of 30 Mbps. Please note that such high connection speeds would not be attainable uniformly across the country. This is the only drawback of the FIOS service.
There are some innovations in the works that will increase the speed capacity of existing infrastructure. This will give an instantaneous increase in speed to cable providers.
But while broadband may be a staple in most metro areas, much of the country has yet to adopt. Like most paradigm shifts, it will take some time for everyone to convert. And many people stuck in rural America simply don’t have access yet.
People postpone their purchase decisions as they wait for others to try out the services, or for a decline in prices, or for the government to come up with a uniform standard for such services (like in the case of the FCC requiring that all TV signals be beamed in digital format). Broadband connections would become ubiquitous once we take to it like we did in the case of inventions like the television and VHS.
Filed under: Broadband