Dialup Internet access is certainly waning - but is it dead? Not quite. There’s still tens of millions accessing the web through dialup in the USA alone.
An survey conducted by Ipsos with over 6,00 adults in various parts of the world, including the USA, shows 20% of respondents were still cruising (albeit rather slowly) the Internet via dialup services.
Here’s the breakdown of various countries and their dialup access users as at December 2006:
Germany - 10%
South Korea - 4%
China - 15%
USA - 19%
Canada - 16%
France - 25%
UK - 15%
Brazil - 43%
India - 46%
Mexico - 44%
Russia - 52%
Statistics for China, Brazil, India, Mexico and Russia were urban samples only.
The USA result still shows to me that we need to be conscious of dialup users in relation to page load times. Don’t make the mistake that dialup folk don’t have cash to spend; there’s all sorts of reasons why they may not have high speed access.
The latest data I could find on the USA Internet population pegged it at around 233 million, so 19% of that is 44 million people; a considerable number. There’s the rest of the world to consider as well, or at the very least, those countries that are part of your target audience.
The other point to bear in mind is that many broadband users have broadband because they like pages to load quickly. I know that on my 1.5 mb connection, I start getting cranky if a page takes more than 10 seconds to load; it seems an eternity!
While the “World Wide Wait” term isn’t bandied about so much any more, I still come across sites that take ages to load, some due to the amount of ads being displayed and the number of database calls that have to be made to generate the page. If you’re going to make your visitors wait, make sure it’s worth it’s worth their time.
