Meryl.net Home About Blog Clients Services Contact

Meryl's Notes Blog

Things wordy, geeky, and webby

Are you bandwidth prejudiced? Before

Wednesday, September 19th, 2001 at 5:59 PM Category: Meryl's Notes Blog No comments

Are you bandwidth prejudiced? Before you start laughing and calling me names, this is not my idea. Or perhaps, you’re a person who is using a modem and can understand what this is about. This Web site is “dedicated to stopping the hate of people using 56K modems.” I used a 56K modem until fall 2000 when a cable company finally offered it in my neighborhood. We still don’t have DSL in this bustling Plano community just walking distance from the new Apple store in the high society-ish mall. Now, I don’t live in a high society neighborhood, but it’s nearby. You’d think the broadband companies would clamor to get our business. Noooooo, they take their sweet little time and we’re at their mercy. My parents desperately want DSL or Cable in their Fort Worth home and it’s not available! They were told it’d be available in July. It’s September and it still ain’t there.

The point is that not everyone has the choice of buying high speed Internet access. Personally, I believe broadband is failing because it is not getting up fast enough, but I am sure there are many reasons and I’m not here to analyze those reasons. How bad is the prejudice against people with 56K (or my goodness, even slower)? How often do you came across a graphically-rich Web site with videos, audios, and other files that would take literally hours for 56K (or less) modems to receive?

Ironically, the graphics on the Web site loads slowly even with a cable connection. When designing Web pages, one of the first things to consider is who is the audience. If it’s other businesses, then you’re probably OK to design for fast connections. Not all small businesses have the luxury of a fast connection. When the audience is home-based, I’d watch out for the heavy duty stuff. Besides, I’ve always thought clean design says more.

Gosh, I remember the day I got a 1200 bps modem and we had to drive an hour to buy it, but it was worth it!