Dial-up Internet access "dying"...
Category: Tech...
Posted Monday, April 28, 2003 at 06:39 AM [GMT-6]

This article in today's Wall Street Journal documents the exodus from the dial-up ranks of the three largest providers, AOL, MSN and EarthLink. Almost 700,000 customers dropped their dial-up services in 1Q03, although it's not clear how many of those simply shifted to another dial-up provider. The column provided only EarthLink's stats regarding broadband customer growth: 112,000 new customers in the 1st quarter (more than offsetting the 74,000 dial-up accounts it lost during that same period).

I doubt these statistics come as a surprise to anyone, and especially not to those who have made the switch and become broadband evangelists. These stats also continue a trend with important implications for website designers, especially those who — like me — have a client base consisting of small businesses and organizations for which the ideal site is one that looks pretty good, works for everyone and doesn't cost too much. They don't want to pay for multiple versions of the same site in order to serve up an optimized "experience" for each browser/platform/plug-in combination. For a designer, this generally means building a site to the lowest common denominator, say, a 56K AOL customer.

The switch to broadband means that we (the designers) can start having a little more guilt-free fun with our designs. We can start to fudge the rules a bit on page size, meaning more or higher quality graphics. We can actually throw in a photo just for atmosphere, here and there, without fearing that the Jakob Neilsen Storm Troopers will kick in our doors in the middle of the night and confiscate our copies of Photoshop.

OTOH, dial-up is still the way the majority of Americans and the vast majority of the rest of the world (...um, excluding Canada) accesses the internet. So, let's not get carried away, shall we?