My only beef with the article was in how in North America, broadband was challenging. We had cable modems back in 1994. I grew up in a single wide trailer with a single mom and even we could afford it. I was downloading from Napster in 1996.
You were definitely a very early adopter if you had broadband in 1994. It wasn’t until the late 90s that most people started switching away from dialup.
Sounds like it. My house in Miami was subject to Adelphia (a notorious scam company) while my friend 20 miles away had fiber to the curb in 2002 or something.
The first residential availability of cable modems was by @Home Network in 1996 and served only the San Francisco Bay Area. By the end of 1996, @Home Network had 20,000 users.
I highly doubt you were one of them but I suppose it's possible.
You were very much not the norm. Also, cable internet wasn't even released to the public until 1996. The only residential "broadband" options at that time were DSL and ISDN, which were both expensive and had very limited proliferation. Only 10 million people had cable internet in 2002.
I grew up in an American suburb and dialup was the norm for me through high school (early/mid-2000s). We did have a solid 56K connection though (which usually ran at about 53.3 kbps) thanks to MSN (back when it was a full-fledged ISP and not a news aggregator).
It wasn't until the latter part of that decade that home broadband became relatively common, and it wasn't particularly fast (ca. 10 Mbps IIRC) nor symmetrical (upload speed was a small fraction of download speed). I had a friend out in the sticks who had to contend with satellite+dialup past 2010.
Decent speeds (50 Mbps+) didn't roll out en masse until the middle part of the 2010s, especially as Netflix exploded.
