Can we assume ubiquity of broadband in 2016?

lol! My parents in their 70's quit dial up 10 years ago

 

When I am on my phone my connection is crappy most of the time. At home its far better since we are paying for 75mbps but get more like 80-90mbps down.

AKA I constantly see less then 1mbps while out and about with sprint in my area.

 

People are going to be limited in speed a bit if for example they use 2.4ghz for connecting same with g or worse. I need to connect via 5ghz to max out my internet connection on both my laptop and my desktop otherwise its limited to less then 54mbps because of the 2.4ghz limitation on N. This is with an AC router as well. So yeah. A good chunk of people are limited to about 5mbps with DSL as well tho.

 

That's nowhere near any dial-up speeds or low enough to require any special considerations, I think.

 

We're definitely heading to a place where everyone is connected, all the time - pretty much everyone i know has a dedicated internet connection nowadays.

 

Well, some DSL really sucks. I had to help somebody that lived 45 minutes away from me, and they needed to reformat their hard drive and reinstall. Trying to download the driver's and other stuff for their computer would have taken all night, and it was about a CD's worth (between 600-700mb). I wound up going home, downloading and burning a CD for them, then doing the reinstall and the first 150mb download was still going when I got back.

Also, others have limitations on their bandwith, and don't want to have to put up with bandwith hogging movies and flash stuff they might not be interested in. High-bandwith ads are the worst.

Finally, you can't discount the phones, which almost universally have both speed limitations and data per month limitations.

In short, don't take having a good, high speed internet connection for granted. Be considerate of those with bandwith limitations. Not everyone is tech savvy enough to disable videos in their browsers and able to turn them back on at need. I know I've had trouble trying to teach some mobile users to do that to save bandwith. Then again, some of them have trouble learning to disable mobile data so it doesn't get used accidentally and only do their heavy browsing on Wi-Fi.

 

I was not aware you could buy a computer with a modem anymore. I guess as of 2014 AOL still had some dial up.

 

some say it is constitutional right.

 

I have an example of a use for dial-up these days. I was laid off from this job nearly ten years ago however.

Back in 2007, I worked for a company installing P.O.S. systems in pizzerias that had a nationwide dial-up account as a last resort for when we could not tether a laptop to the phone. I actually had to use it in Hindsdale, IL, which is NOT a rural area, but at the time Verizon had terrible reception for the cell phones. The client was not operational and did not yet have their internet set up (it was installed about 3 days later), but they had a phone and I had to upload the corrected menus to HQ. Fortunately they could fit on a floppy. We also couldn't find a place with free Wi-Fi within a mile of the place, and there was too much traffic and construction to go much farther.

Oddly enough, Cingular DID have decent reception on my personal flip phone of the time, but I did not have internet capability on that thing. Somehow having only one or no bars also seemed to drain the batteries of the company issued Blackberry phones. While normally they could last up to 3 days without charging, they were reporting low power at the end of the day.

 

It took my second reading of this to get to what you probably meant by P.O.S.

Cingular in the house!!!!!!! That was my first cell phone company.

 

We had three vehicles at the satellite office I worked at, two PT Cruisers, one of which was for the sales guy, and a big full-size van. The van had
"
Signature Systems
P.D.Q.
P.O.S.
"
painted on the side, and we used to joke that the P.O.S. was referring to the van instead of our product, since it was one step away from the junkyard. The PT Cruisers lacked the P.O.S. and only said
"Signature Systems
P.D.Q."

---

 

I'm only familiar with the "piece of sh*t" meaning of this acronym... what does P.O.S stand for in this context

 

Point of Sale