Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/02/narrow-broadband.html
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“Broadband unavailable” checking in. I live 15 minutes from the Intel facility in Oregon and yet all I have available is DSL. 1 mile from the nearest Comcast served address and nobody is willing to run that last mile of cable to hook up 10 homes tucked up in the hills.
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But the free markets dude /s
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I’m not bagging on the research, but trends like this are inevitable once market saturation takes place in any industry, right?
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Is it because we’re all too busy staring at our phones now?
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A fair point, if there are several carriers which do business in @TuttBoucher 's governmental unit.
If Comcast has a monopoly granted by the city/county, there is no “free market”.
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I live in San Francisco, theoretically one of the world’s biggest tech hubs, and I wasn’t able to get fiber Internet in my neighborhood until this year.
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I guess now is not the best time launch my idea for digital toilet paper.
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Slashdot is still a thing? Who knew?
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Thousand dollar smart phones. Peak tech?
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once a technology grows out of that adorable toddler phase and we can see what it’s actually like the adoption rate goes down quickly.
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There is more to it than cell phones, laptops and tablets now. Those are still the primary devices around which we organize our lives, but it seems like a somewhat limited sampling of tech - it would be interesting to see how the number of connected devices people own has changed.
Some people own a tablet, smart phone and desktop/laptop - plus some combination of an activity tracker, connected TV, bluetooth/wireless speakers, and various ‘smart’ appliances. Then there are drones, high-end digital cameras and the list goes on. Individual technologies may be saturating, but their overall share of our lives is still increasing.
It’s interesting that many people own a non-smartphone cell phone. I feel like I never see those people, but I know they are out there.
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Right, adoption of drones, self-driving cars, voice recognition systems, and many other technologies is probably still increasing.
To be fair Cory does specify which tech he’s talking about in his post; it’s only the headline that’s overwrought.
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its Telecoms and Cables strangle hold on the cost and speed of service that is holding us back while they milk us for every dime then can get
I know I’m sliding backwards - I’m considering canceling my FIOS and getting slower DSL just to get out from under Verizon. Thats not progress. Verizon continuously raising prices for access all the while costs should be going down, that is not progress. Its racketeering.
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I was reading about 5g and thinking, it’s not really that big of a deal. Besides where I live it will be 5 years before I see it. I use Linux so I don’t need to the latest laptop. I tried Android Auto and was disappointed. 4k TV? Really show me a new tech that is really worth spending money on.
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All those devices are just glorified televisions.
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This Pew Center report doesn’t ask about other devices or other tech that we use. It would be interesting to see a study on other tech - I have a fitbit on my wrist, we use a connected sphere with the iPad to play with the cats, my camera has the ability to use wifi, I ask my siri to make calls and send texts, so I use all sorts of stuff, even tho my preferred thing is my good old desktop with a big monitor. In a survey, I’d be old PC user, not early adopter of weird ancillary tech since the 80s.
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Let’s not forget that a huge percentage of “tech” is not consumer facing.
Business and governments are massive buyers of tech that form the backbone of our daily lives - networking gear, servers, cloud services, SaaS, virtualization, containers, VoIP, storage, etc, etc… the list is endless and I don’t see any of this flat-lining anytime soon. Actual “big iron” hardware purchases are down but the sheer amount of new IT services being deployed is staggering.
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It says it isn’t due to saturation, but with the exception of high speed internet where people want it, but can’t get it, it sure sounds like saturation to me.
Everyone that wants the tech has it. People who are afraid of their technological competency fall under “don’t want it” in my book. THEY will decide when they do, not the corporations.
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Absolutely: the fact that the chart perfectly tracks the collapse in real wages is merely an accidental correlation.
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