Broadband the socio economic divide

Speaking as a person who does not have broadband but has gone to great expense to have ISDN in Ireland. I have observed through conversations with my colleagues that those who have broadband are financially more well off than those who do not, due to the savings that they can make through the leverage of broadband.

These savings are many and include:

1 - Telephone charges - My colleague Bernie Goldbach utilises the VOIP service that skype provides to ring the USA for 1 cent per minute, it is cheaper for him to ring a mobile phone in Ireland (10 c per minute) using skype that using Eircom. This is feasible due to the allways on nature of broadband with a flat charge, unlike dial up users who can only buy so many hours of internet time.

2 - Cheaper film processing
There a number of companies who will print of your digital prints and mail them to you. The problem is a decent 5 megapixel plus image is going to be about 1.4 mb plus. The upload time for an average user on dial up using 56 k is 3.92 minutes approx for broadband its 23 seconds. The dial up connection speeds discourage the use of this service.

3- Books and cd's
Trying to shop online with dial up is slow and painful, most users don' bother. The savings however can be considerable. Broadband users don't face these problems.