Daily Technical

I haven’t posted for a few days because I spent a little time in the very sunny, very warm, somewhat rural, Destin, Florida. Even though this was a short vacation, I still felt the need to get online. Unfortunately, a high speed wireless or wired connection (or any speed for that matter) was simply unavailable at the condo where I was staying. And in my 2007 mentality of having an always-on or always available high-speed internet connection at the ready practically anywhere I go, I believed that meant I was instantly powerless to get connected. Until my sis-in-law said ‘why don’t you just dial up?’ Duh.

It has been what feels like eons since I have used dialup to get online. But in my need for my internet fix, I didn’t hesitate to unplug the (completely unused) landline and plug in my modem (and pray that the driver for it was installed). It felt like eons waiting for sites as simple as my gmail account to load. Made me wonder what percentage of the online community is still utilizing dialup. An article over at Computerworld estimates that about 60 million Americans live in rural areas that don’t even have the option to purchase a high speed connection. This doesn’t even take into consideration the number of people that have the access to a broadband or DSL connection, but simply choose to not upgrade either because of cost, or due to their feeling that they don’t need it.

Although this may not specifically relate to web ops in the sense of technical operations, I became curious (partially because I am managing the redesign of one new website) and so I ran a few reports at my current job just see exactly how many visitors we receive that are utilizing dialup (as believed by the analytics tool we use). The total is roughly 10%. Considering the millions of uniques that we see each month, that is a surprisingly high number to me and could certainly have some impact to potential revenues. I’m curious what others out there see in the sites that they manage just for comparison…