Subject: [NEXTEL-1] NYTimes.com Article: Living the Broadband Life

From: NEXTEL-1
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 00:46:54 -0400

-------- Original Message --------
From: Anthony Townsend <[email-masked]>
Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Living the Broadband Life

I'm surprised to see the New York metro area so high on this list. I  
wonder how they are defining it.

But the US has quietly crept up to 75% Internet household penetration,  
with about half of those having broadband (confirmed by a March 2004  
Nielsen/NetRatings survey -  
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0403/)

So that makes about 35-36% household broadband penetration.... not so  
shabby and catching up with places like Korea and Canada.

The only numbers I really trust in this whole debate though are those  
published by the OECD.
http://www.oecd.org/document/60/ 
0,2340,en_2825_495656_2496764_1_1_1_1,00.html

A little out of date, but I would suspect that is a good correction for  
the hype factor that I suspect is built into a lot of these private  
market surveys.

>
>
> Living the Broadband Life
>
> July 15, 2004
>  By KATIE HAFNER
>
>
>
>
>
> San Diego
>
> DEBRA GIBB has had a high-speed Internet connection in her
> home longer than anyone she knows. In late 1996, when Time
> Warner Cable began trials here for its cable modem service,
> Ms. Gibb leapt at the chance to become one of the first
> residential broadband users in the nation. She was beta
> tester No. 6 in San Diego, she said.
>
> Since then, Ms. Gibb, 47, her husband, Tom, 46, and their
> teenage twin sons have been in the vanguard of the
> broadband way of life that now defines this city of 1.2
> million people.
>
> Like many San Diegans, the Gibb family use the Net for the
> same things people elsewhere do - e-mail, shopping, games,
> trip planning. But they do more of it. Broadband, with its
> "always on" connection, is so ingrained here that residents
> can't imagine life without it. For them, the Internet is
> like hot and cold running water - available 24 hours a day
> with a flick of the wrist.
>
> San Diego was one of the first cities in the nation to get
> residential high-speed Internet connections, and some 55
> percent of households with Internet access have high-speed
> cable modem or D.S.L. service - a higher percentage than in
> any other metropolitan area in the country, according to a
> survey by comScore Networks, a market research firm. Next
> in line, according to comScore, are Boston, where 53
> percent of wired households have high-speed connections,
> and New York, with 51 percent.
>
> San Diego and other cities with such heavy broadband use
> serve as signposts for what other cities might come to
> expect in a future when such service is an omnipresent and
> vital part of daily life.
>
> Before getting in their cars, for instance, San Diegans
> routinely check traffic online. If conditions look
> unbearable they can use their broadband connections to work
> from home.
>
> According to comScore, Internet users in San Diego are more
> likely than others elsewhere to shop online. They spend
> more money online than Internet users in other cities, and
> they visit more Web sites.
>
> San Diegans use the Web to read the news, to check the
> tide's comings and goings and to tap into the surf-cams
> that line the local beaches so they can find the best
> waves.
>
> They use the Web to reserve and renew library books and,
> increasingly, to buy their groceries.
>
> Ms. Gibb, who until recently was vice president for
> operations at a local telecommunications company, does much
> of her shopping online, often starting with eBay. She still
> shops locally, she said, but seldom leaves the house before
> checking on essentials like a store's hours. She rarely
> uses her phone book. So steeped is she in the broadband way
> of life that when traveling, she will not even consider
> staying in a hotel that does not offer high-speed Internet
> access.
>
> When the Gibbs were house-hunting three years ago and
> thinking of leaving Scripps Ranch, a sprawling development
> of about 12,000 homes at the northeast corner of San Diego,
> they found a house they loved in Poway, just three miles
> north.
>
> "Everything about it was perfect," Ms. Gibb said. "It had a
> great layout, and five acres. Everything." But when they
> found out that no broadband service was available in the
> neighborhood, they decided not to buy. "It was like saying
> there was no electricity," she said.
>
> San Diegans use the Web to buy their cars, and if they
> could go online to fill their gas tanks, they would. "You
> can't buy gas online, but you can track gas prices
> locally," said Mark Juergensen, 43, a Scripps Ranch
> resident who, like Ms. Gibb, was one of the earliest
> broadband users in San Diego.
>
> Scripps Ranch was one of the first places in San Diego to
> get Time Warner's high-speed service, called Road Runner.
> The average annual income in Scripps Ranch is $73,000, and
> that relative affluence is one of the reasons it was chosen
> as a testbed.
>
> For Mr. Juergensen, a software engineer, the benefits of
> his broadband connection go well beyond online price
> comparisons. His company is 45 minutes north of Scripps
> Ranch, in San Clemente, and he is able to work from home
> two or three days a week. That would not be possible if he
> had only a dial-up connection. "File sizes have gotten too
> big," he said. "It's rare I work with anything that isn't
> 10 megabytes."
>
> The Juergensens no longer get the newspaper everyday.
> Instead, like the Gibbs, they read The San Diego
> Union-Tribune online. Mr. Juergensen's 4-year-old son,
> Drew, has come to expect that whenever he pushes the WWW
> button on the keyboard, the browser will head straight to
> Playland Disney. Mr. Juergensen's wife, Susan, knows that
> she is expected to check her e-mail for any and all
> information pertaining to Drew's soccer league. And when it
> came time to look for play groups for her 10-month-old,
> Mara, word of mouth came via the Web.
>
> Ms. Gibb tells stories about the early days of broadband
> use with the gusto of an old-timer describing the advent of
> electricity. Time Warner chose San Diego as one of the
> original test markets because the company was installing a
> sophisticated fiber-optic network. The other test cities
> were Portland, Me.; Akron, Ohio; and Elmira, N.Y.
>
> When five Time Warner installation technicians showed up at
> the Gibb home, the sixth household in the city to get
> connected, Ms. Gibb knew she was part of something very
> new. "It was unknown territory," she said. In the middle of
> the long installation procedure, Ms. Gibb, an expert in
> computer networking, asked if she could go down to the
> truck and cut some cable herself. "These guys didn't have a
> clue," she said. "I'll never forget it."
>
> There were technical glitches at first, but relatively few,
> she said. The new service caught on quickly around San
> Diego. Other cable and telephone companies began offering
> competing high-speed services as well. According to
> comScore, roughly four of five high-speed Internet users in
> the city have cable modem service; the others have D.S.L.
>
> The utility and power of a fast connection is now something
> that such families simply expect to be there, like a cold
> refrigerator, a dial tone and hundreds of cable TV
> channels. Time Warner Cable now has some 100,000 cable
> modem customers in the area.
>
> When a visitor tells Ms. Gibb that other areas of the
> country have yet to catch up, and that broadband
> connections are still a novelty for a lot of people, she
> looks surprised.
>
> "Really?" she says.
>
> The large, airy upstairs den in the Gibb home is the
> electronics hub, filled with computers, printers, a cable
> modem and a router. Downstairs are another two computers
> and a printer. Everything is on a network.
>
> Each of their 13-year-old twin sons, Morgan and Cayman, has
> his own computer, and neither can remember life without
> broadband.
>
> "You could take away the TV before you could take away the
> Web," said Ms. Gibb. "If we have to punish them, we take
> away the computer, or we limit it, because they still have
> to use it to do their schoolwork." Morgan lost his instant
> messaging privileges once for a month. "He went nuts," said
> Ms. Gibb.
>
> A fire that swept through Scripps Ranch nine months ago,
> destroying 312 homes, made the neighborhood's dependence on
> the Web especially clear. Ms. Gibb recounts it as if it
> happened yesterday. She and her family evacuated the
> morning after the fire started. The computer, a small safe
> and some tax records were the only things she put in the
> car.
>
> The sky was so hazy with smoke that helicopters could not
> give an accurate picture of which houses were still
> standing. For the first two days, the Gibbs checked by
> calling the house and waiting for the answering machine to
> pick up. But by Tuesday, the electricity to the area was
> out.
>
>> From their hotel, the Gibbs logged on to scrippsranch.org,
> a Web site run by the Scripps Ranch Civic Association,
> which was posting street addresses of homes known to have
> been destroyed.
>
> They were, it turned out, part of a virtual stampede.
>
> On
> Sunday, the first day of the fire, 4,400 people went to the
> Web site looking for information, nearly 20 times the
> normal number. The next day, that number had shot up to
> 44,000 and on Tuesday, the site had 122,000 visitors, with
> many looking for information about the fate of their homes
> or those of friends.
>
> Greg Minter, 23, the Web master of scrippsranch.org, was
> one of the few people allowed into the burned areas,
> escorted by police officers. Using a wireless modem, he
> posted the street address of burned houses at the Web site
> as he found them. The site came to be one of the quickest
> and most reliable sources of news. "That Web site was a
> real lifeline," Ms. Gibb said.
>
> Without the pervasiveness of broadband in Scripps Ranch,
> she said, certain options would not exist. For example, the
> gated entry area to the Gibbs' neighborhood was vandalized
> recently, and the incident was caught on video as it
> happened. Immediately, digital photos of the vandals were
> e-mailed around the neighborhood; the culprits were
> identified and quickly caught.
>
> "I doubt we'd have done anything like this in the days of
> low bandwidth dial-up connections," she said.
>
> Then there are the more frivolous ways in which San Diegans
> consider the Web an indispensable part of their day.
>
> Tally Kuhl, 29, a firefighter and avid surfer who lives in
> Scripps Ranch, uses his broadband connection to see how the
> waves are breaking at his favorite beaches, courtesy of a
> surf-cam site.
>
> "Most of the time I check it before going out," he said.
> And, of course, he checks the real-time traffic maps posted
> by the California Department of Transportation before
> getting in his car.
>
> San Diegans are already thinking about greater speeds. "A
> lot of people are looking for more streaming and more
> online gaming," said Ernie Villicana, vice president for
> marketing at Time Warner Cable in San Diego.
>
> The company is testing a premium service that runs at
> double the speed that most broadband households get today.
> When the new service arrives in San Diego, the Gibb family
> will no doubt be one of the first to sign up.
>
> "I'm definitely looking for what's next," said Ms. Gibb,
> not flinching at the idea of paying perhaps $30 more a
> month. "I would jump on that in a minute."
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/technology/circuits/15broa.html? 
> ex=1090861001&ei=1&en=7c97bb6f438cc715
>

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> 
Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70
http://us.click.yahoo.com/Z1wmxD/DREIAA/yQLSAA/61FxlB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~-> 

-- 
    "NEXTEL-1 IT'S NOT JUST NEXTEL"
  Note The New address 
Subscribe to Nextel-1: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/NEXTEL-1

  "NEXTEL2 FOR iDEN SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS"
Subscribe to Nextel2: http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/NEXTEL2

  "WIRELESS FORUM HOMELAND SECURITY GROUP"
     The Complete Resource for Wireless Homeland Security.
Subscribe to WFHSG:  http://www.groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/WFHSG

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEXTEL-1/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    [email-masked]

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
 
---
You are currently subscribed to telecom-cities as: [email-masked]
To unsubscribe send a blank email to [email-masked]

To set DIGEST mode and only receive one list message per day with all the daily traffic, please visit the list website at http://www.informationcity.org/telecom-cities