Topic awaiting preservation: Dialup/DSL/Cable

I wonder what the statistics are these days. Do most people still have dial-up? I know I did until 3 months ago and I would not have chaged to cable if I hadnt moved apartments. I am designing a new site for an audience aged 45+, poor website navigators, and probably have dial-up, so I need to be sensitive to them. Damn!

I'm on dialup, and if I ever encounter a site that starts hogging my precious copper wire, I send my love to the cute little X in the top right corner of my screen. =)

DSL. And, making small websites is good. It's nice when you're kept on your toes, so you'll really have to think out what to use in a design, and what to skip. Otherwise, people are going to use the 'Dracusis' approach and you won't have your visitors at all.

ADSL...512 Download, 128 Upload...I love it...

Low ping goodness....

cable 600k. Whats a dial up?




~We're not here for long, we're here for fun~

Oh heck - I am on dial-up, over 45 - ( I will cover the nav later. ) I refuse to get cable because it is way overpriced here. I cann't get DSL because the Bell hasn't installed it in this area yet. So any sites that have long loading times and I feel I really should see - I forward the URL to work were we have one of those super-duper connections.

As far as poor navigators - well in my humble opinion there is only poor layout of the navigation.

The above sentence is based on letting my neighbor (whoe doesn't have a PC) cruise the net on my pc. Once I explanied to her what she is looking for to move along on the net she was fine.

I would love to have DSL - but for 16.95 a month unlimited access dial-up isn't that bad.

sib

I was stuck on 56k for the longest time, only got DSL relatively recently, like half a year ago maybe... (384 down, 256 up)

Making a small site makes DSL/Cable people happy too, me at least. Can't really say why, but there's just something about having a site load instantaneously. Mm, warm and fuzzy.

Cable 640 DL/256UL since three years.

Considering changing to some adsl-version where I get 1-2mb both ways.

Nimraw: You're on ADSL now if you've got different Down/Up stream speeds. Same datarates both ways is SDSL.

Difference being:

ADSL: Asymetrical Digital Subscriber Line

SDSL: Symetrical Digital Subscriber Line.

As a 45+(56kdialuper) web meanderer, I thank you for your sensitivity CRO8, I would salute you, but if I let go of my zimmer frame I fallover Dracusis, "I send my love to the cute little X in the top right corner of my screen" **Brilliant**
My 56k deal is unlimited access for £13 on top of my normal phone bill. I can't get broadband in my area, but if I could I would be sorely tempted.

sorry about that Skaarjj... Thanks for explaining

To my non-tech mind ADSL etc is something that goes through my phoneline and Cable is "other" which in my case is a connection via the cabel TV company.

The weird thing is that in Sweden people call the HW for what I need "Cable modem" and separates that from "ADSL modem"

And there's much talk over here about ADSL with similar speeds up and down, but then again I know there's a jungle of the DSL-techniques around...ADSL/SDSL/VDSL.. enough to confuse me

ADSL here

Yep...we aussies diferentiate between cable modems and ADSL modems as well, becuase an ADSL modem (or SDSL, or xDSL really) modem runs through the phone line and there into your computer/network (depends on if oyu have a router or not), whereas a cable modem runs from the cable wall plug into your computer/network.

sib + Taobaybee

oh man- I did not mean any disrespect (I hope you did not take it that way). Of course, I was referring to folks who do not have much experience surfing the net- you two are the exception as you obviously know what you are doing- being quality members of the asylum. Geez, I am sure there are 29 yr olds (my age) who do not have experience surfing the net and require simple nav.

Yeah Drac *sigh*, I know, that little x in the corner. Very tempting when sites do not load right away. OK, decision time. I will let you cats know what I decide to do . . .

Thanks!
CRO8

CRO8, non taken at all, no problemo

Cable: 2M down, 256K up. I too fit the over 45 demographic.

I still have my trusty old USR Courier V.Everything on my main PC and maintain a free dialup account (NetZero) for testing sites on dial-up. Comes in handy too when cable goes out. I've also been known to leech off my roomate's AOL account using dial-up to test there.

I have a client whose site is closer in practice to an Extranet (Intranet accessible from outside) with a high percentage of "elderly" users like me who live in outlying areas where broadband isn't available. One of the ways I keep this client happy, for nearly three years now, is testing on dialup and making sure everything works in NN4 and IE4.

Yes, it's a pain in the ass to keep the site running and usable with antique browsers and dial-up, but it would be a greater pain in the ass making do without that check every month.

CRO8: The information you need is in the client's site logs. No other statistics are valid. Chances are, log analyzer programs won't give it to you, since for the most part, they're designed to provide only summaries of the visits, not details on the visitors.

I break the raw logs up into 64K line chunks (with a text editor) then have at them with Excel. I'm then able to identify dial-up vs. broaadband visits by the DNS information in the logs. Locally, I know that rochester.rr.com and certain IP ranges of frontiernet.net are broadband. When I encounter one I don't know, I go to their web site.

The particular client I referred to above, runs about 60% dialup and about 25% version 4 browsers. If I relied on "industry" statistics, I'd have it all wrong and lose this client because it would be too slow for 40% of their visitors and unreadable for 25%.

That's why I stress that you collect the information from the client's logs. Client's don't give a rat's ass about industry figures. All that matters to them are their own visitors. Handle them right by catering to their demographic and you'll have a client for life.

brusew

very nice. Thanks. I agree, client logs seems like to offer the most accurate info. Now, how do I gain access to client log? Is that a term I can ask my host company and maybe they can point me towards the admin page of the site? I did not realize that info was available. I knew I could see stats about number of visits per hour/day/week/month . . .

Thanks.
CRO8

* how can I test my site on different connection speeds? Since I have cable, I do not know how anything loads in 56k.

[This message has been edited by CRO8 (edited 09-01-2003).]

56K here, 4K/sec down/2.5k/sec up. Also in the *antique* demographic

And I agree that all nav should be as simple as possible. In my exterience, even very experienced users don`t appreciate complex navigation.

CRO8 ; As Bruce mentioned, a free dialup account (as they aren`t renouned for their speed) , or a friends computer would serve nicely.

Thanks DB.

Yep, agree with DB... Even when I'm at the Univ browsing on my breaks from work, I don't like any sites without a fairly simple navigation (maybe the only exception is if it's a novelty site that you're not trying to get any information from...)... And if a page I need takes more than 10 seconds to load there, I'm generally unimpressed and move on before too long. However here at the house, I typically wait upwards of a minute or two or three for pages to load (which might explain why I'm not on much here ::shrugs: ...

Back on topic... Ungodly slow dial-up here: ~3k down, ~2k up (on a good day)...

...Dial up.

quote:

---

Now, how do I gain access to client log? Is that a term I can ask my host company and maybe they can point me towards the admin page of the site? I did not realize that info was available. I knew I could see stats about number of visits per hour/day/week/month . . .

---

What you need are the "raw" logs. These are the source data for the stats reporting. If you have stats, you must have logs. They should be available somewhere in the client's account for some period of time. There's no real standard location. They could be anywhere.

In order to save disk space, some hosting services delete the logs after the stats are updated. Sometimes you can change those settings in the control panel, at other hosts you may have to ask that they don't do that for a while. Worst case, you could download the raw logs before the cron job runs.

HTH!

Fast cable. Not sure how fast. Pretty fast, though.

As of right at this moment... 3MBit down/1MBit up

I have no friends on dial up anymore. That's right bob, Weadah and Michael - I hate you all

I'm 54 and I (we) have 1024 down 256 up shared by the home network, which comprises myself and my wife, my web radio station (broadcasting to relay servers 24x7), plus the family and friends web/mail/webmail/chat/forum server.

Incidentally, my mother is 22 yrs older than me, and she and her husband have just installed, and are learning how to use, their very first computer (I gave them one of mine). They have sattelite broadband (Sky I think) and they're taking evening classes especially for pensioners to learn how to use computer technology .. free and supplied by a local technology for the aged charity ... I get regular e-mails from them already ...


Bug-free software only exisits in two places
A programmer's mind and a salesman's lips

I will look into my host for client logs.

Thanks.

Explorer 1

I still use dial up for now as I am always on the move with laptop and can plug in absolutely anywhere... It's cheap and serves my purposes at the present. I'm sure that when I plant some deeper roots I'll go mental and go to 1024k

Deleted Xel.

I have cable at home.

Jestah

150k Cable

Wow, synax, imagine them being on top of the world....jk.

Your parents are pretty lucky to have a satellite connection for free.

*sigh* I had a friend once who's father was a head tech for Telstra (the australian teleco)...He had a fibre optic link straight into telstras international servers....a 100mbit connection....

God I miss that....

Dialup at home; T1 satellite link at work. Well, it's actually only about 128kb up/down or so since the rest of the satellite bandwidth is used for long distance traffic.

And I would love, i say love, to go broadband but unfortunately there is no broadband service here at all.

Now, since I work for one of the only two ISPs down here, I'm hoping to get a broadband solution up and running in the near future. The downside is that the monthly fees are probably going to be outrageous ($200+), but there's nothing I can do about that since the backhaul fees are ridiculous on this rock I call home.

Got ADSL (ca 400Kbit download speed) at home, but at school (and the place I'm moving to soon) has something which is very fast. Not sure what exactly, but I usually get download speeds somewhere around 150Kbyte/sec

_________________________
"There are 10 kinds of people; those who know binary, those who don't and those who start counting at zero"

[This message has been edited by Veneficuz (edited 09-09-2003).]