I have to somewhat disagree, as Mr. and Mrs america are dollar conscious, look at cell phone usage there are over 500 million people living in america roughly half have cell phones do to price and age.
Another case is to look at dial up, it still has millions of customers (exact count I don't know) but for many people they only want the cheapest way to get to the internet. There is still ISDN and your lower teir DSL ~1-2MBPS that many people will pay less for and keep paying less for.
Right now you also have to look at the economy, many people are looking at cutting back on non-necessities like cable, internet and such. This could ripple through for several years.
Also look how long it has taken to get this technology out, it was all proven in '97 while I was in college I remember talking about it and they were starting to deploy it. I'm an electrical engineer so we were studying this technology closely. It is now 11 years later and it still hasn't caught on very strong.

So in my opinion this would be more of a long shot of happening; so my prediction is short.

To me, ejcassel's arguments are much more convincing than dbsquared's arguments.

There will always be people who opt out of getting fast internet (like me), but those who want it will usually get the fastest thing that is widely available. If we assume that well over 30% of the country will be using broadband in 2012 (a safe assumption, I think), I believe we can also assume that most of those people will go for 10MBPS+ connections. In fact, that seems quite conservative to me. I believe the average connection speed of the top 30% will be much faster than that.

If there is one thing that computer history has taught us, its that everything gets faster exponentially.

This is an easy long, IMHO.

I agree, it's a long, but I've pulled out for now to save $$. I don't want to wave ride, so I'm just gonna sit out on this one till it stabilizes a bit.

By the way dbsquared, we just broke the 300 million mark last year. Not quite up to 500 million Americans yet. Also, according to article below, over 80% of Americans have cell phones, and over 20 million have high speed internet on their phone. This was in Nov 2007.
http://www.gearlog.com/2007/11/us_cellphone_penetration_tops.php

Frankly, I can't figure out why this IPO is falling. You would think a technology centered website would have readers who knew a little bit about technology trends. As fiber optics become more integrated, 10Mbps + speeds are going to become fairly cheap and common.

I would disagree as i worked for sprint and saw all these numbers. The "High speed" 3G cell phone is 128kbps the new 1xevdo is .5-5Mbps depending on phone and package choice. 4G or wimax is suposedly up to 25Mbps but with only one phone in the area using the service, average thorughput are around 5Mbps.
I will stick short because I believe the tech savy consumer is actually a minority, and most people vote with thier wallets sorry.
I could be surprised and proven wrong though.

The cost of ISDN is cost prohibitive for an average home user , (It is still an anaolg service) it costs $65 a month . It is generally cheaper to buy DSL(digitial service) nowdays, it is cost comparative to current dial-up prices without waiting for the time of the dialup connection time and DSL is at least 12x(up to 1000x) faster than basic dial-up.
Millions of people ,who formerly had dial-up have switched over to broadband by Cable or DSL (I was one of those) and the # of users on dial-up is quickly is going down as the users got fed up with dial-up speeds(It is too slow and takes about 2 to 5 min to load a single web page, the size(average) of the web page had gone up from a measly 20Kb to 280Kb and sometimes as big as 1Mb)
Downloading 1MB on dial-up takes about an hour, they avarage 40 to 50Kbps. THe ISDN average 64Kbps to 128Kbps. while on Dsl Lite(768Kbps to1.5Mbps which costs between 15 to 20 a month) will only take about a minute on a 1Mb file.

I have provided a few links about the transmission speeds and a basic description of other stuff

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Subscriber_Line

This prop is NOT about the cellphone service, It is based on the AT HOME Service (Cable,Dial-Up,DSL,and etc)

this has until 2012! That is plenty of time for the cost of Broadband to decrease to a rate that even the cheapies will pay for. Also, there are more and more "bundles" available for people, which makes the cost more reasonable. Then you have all of the services that are being added to the internet that require higher speeds. And last, I know a few people who cannot get high speed internet but want it. They will get it as soon as it is available in the sticks.

Found the right thread, was righting in the other one first....

ANy way, I must agree with the bundle point of scooby and also would like to reiterate as I said in the former post, its the question we all must ask...

When does slower internet speeds stop performing all the Web 2.0 functions that the average consumer is starting to get dependent on?

I know christux argument about VDSL, but thats only in the country and in cities where most of the population is, most people will generally get Fios or cable....

This looks like a long and this is really annoying when people start wave riding.....

Why is this IPO falling can anyone give me a good explanation!!!

It is falling because...

...people are shorting it.

(you had to know that was coming)

Yeah but it is rebounding, people just short it for no reason!!1

It's collective head's of knuckles' acting on bad info.

Peace through kinetic solutions