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Wanted: More Broadband
Posted on Wednesday, December 27, 2006 at 11:08 AM by Jason Barker
PC World has published an article claiming that the United States lags behind many other nations in the quality of U.S. broadband networks. As one paragraph states:
"We need real broadband," said Walter Mossberg, a product reviewer and technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, speaking on a panel of tech industry observers at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. He described the broadband network in the U.S. as "pathetic" compared to what's available in other countries.
According to WebSiteOptimization.com, 76.33 percent of active American Internet users currently use broadband (the number is expected to rise to 80 percent by the end of 2006); this means that only 23.67 percent of active American Internet users access the Web through a dialup connection. The problem, according to PC World, is that U.S. broadband speeds are significantly slower than in other countries with high broadband penetration.
Statistics such as this have a significant impact on the development of online Orthodox Christian Bible studies. The relatively high penetration of broadband means that it is reasonable to develop multimedia Bible studies, which require a higher bandwidth than simple text-based articles alone. At the same time, a reasonable percentage of users continue to use dialup connections (even though that percentage is continually dropping). I address this issue by offering the majority of the textual content from our Bible studies in two formats: incorporated into the multimedia applications themselves for broadband users, and available separately as HTML documents for dialup users.
At the same time, there are limitations - excluding such previously referenced limitations as our lack of resources to create such materials - on the amount and quality of audio/video material I can incorporate into these studies. As broadband speeds increase, the amount and quality of audio/video materials online can increase.
Posted in Miscellaneous