As the economy slips further into the tank and more and more people lose jobs, houses and savings, some Internet subscribers have opted to lose their minds as well. Welcome back, dial-up!
Some Internet providers are seeing a spike in the amount of costumers who buy less expensive dial-up Internet plans as we venture further into the depths of this recession.
For those who don’t remember the 1990s, dial-up Internet is the maddening, torpid Internet connection that cable providers have been trying to quash for the last decade or so.
If the speed (or lack thereof) isn’t enough to drive users absolutely insane, the sound a computer makes while attempting to use this prehistoric connection certainly is. The 40-second harmony of dial tones, beeps, static and buzzing can best be described as what it would sound like if robots could fart.
It is without question that the financial climate of the times calls for a more frugal approach to entertainment, but the Internet is much more than entertainment. The reality is that the Internet is now the most important communication and information outlet on the planet, and people have come to rely on it heavily.
Here are a few hypothetical situations to illustrate the importance of a lightning-fast Internet connection: Picture yourself on a Sunday morning in early December. You get a call from a friend who tells you that the running back you have starting in your fantasy football league was arrested for assault the night before.
With only 25 minutes to game time, you need to make the change in the lineup for any chance at reaching the postseason. You run to the computer, frantically sign in to your league’s Web site and attempt to make the change. You don’t have time to screw around listening to robot farts and dial tones — you need to get in and out of there as quickly as possible if you want to be comfortably on the couch by kickoff with the peace of mind that you made the switch.
Picture this, ladies: It’s Saturday night, you’re getting ready to go to Scottsdale for a night out, and you have a sneaking suspicion that the shirt you want to wear is the same shirt you wore last Saturday night, to the same bar, with the same people. This is the recipe for a fashion catastrophe, from the likes of which someone may never recover.
Lucky for you, there are pictures of you doing Jell-O shots from last Saturday plastered all over Facebook. With your ride in the driveway, you need an immediate answer to the shirt crisis.
With a dial-up connection, you’re looking at about 5 minutes before you even get signed in to make the comparison. In that time, your friends get sick of waiting and leave you. They meet up with the guy you’re interested in, and one of them goes home with him. You find out and become a basket case, and all your friends decide they never want to speak to you again because you’ve become too much to handle. You are now the ultimate social pariah.
As you sit alone in a restroom stall in Hayden Library while eating your lunch, you say to yourself, “If I had only just spent the extra $20 for broadband, none of this would have happened.”
Bottom line: If an extra $20 for a reasonable Internet connection is going to make or break someone, it’s time to sell the computer, not bring back a dead technology.
