Do Modems Still Matter?

I believe that it is entirely too easy fall into the belief that modems are dead. So long as broadband is out of reach for certain areas of the world, the modem is often all that is available.

One of the key ingredients for Web 2.0 success is pervasive high speed internet access. The latest Pew internet report, which tracks broadband growth, was just released:

At the end of March 2006, 42% of Americans had high-speed at home, up from 30% in March 2005, or a 40% increase. And 48 million Americans — mostly those with high-speed at home — have posted content to the internet.

In total, 84 million Americans now have high speed internet connections at home.

At the height of the last dot-com bubble in mid-2000, less than five percent of Americans had access to a high speed internet connection at home. But by the end of 2006, that figure will reach nearly fifty percent…. Source: Coding Horror

[tags]web 2.0,americans,modems,internet access[/tags]