homework 2

1:
broadband penetration in the US represents the advancement and quality of the net for the country as a whole. even if everyone in the US was connected to the internet, if they are on a dial-up connection then the bandwidth supplied to them is below what modern pages need to view. ever since it gained popularity in the mid 90s, the content on the internet has been evolving, and so has the connection speeds for the users with it. starting in the late 90s broadband (high-speed) connections started to pick up, and have been increasing in numbers every month. as you can see from the graph here, from late 99 to 2006, there is a sharp increase that does not have any appearances of leveling off (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0408/broadband_hm_td_0407.gif)however if you look at an updated graph here (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0906/broadband_hm_td_0906.png) you notice that the total broadband penetration has leveled off due to the total number nearing 100 %.
based on previous and current graphs i predict that the broadband penetration for the US will continue to rise, but at a much much slower rate. the remaining 5 % of users that are not on high speed are most likely the people that live far out from any cities, or populated areas in general that do not have easy access to anything besides satellite connectivity, or dial-up. even by the year 2015 i doubt we will have reached the 98 % mark but regardless with near all of the country on higher speeds, for all intents and purposes there is not much of a reason to adapt to the needs of those without.

on a side note, although broadband connections may be what the majority have, the US household internet connectivity is not near 100 % as you can see from this graph (http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0906/us-internet-connection-trends.png) a much smaller 70 % of the population is connected at all. however i believe this in the future will follow the same path as the broadband penetration over dial-up. the amount of people that do have connections will level off at around 9x % due to the nonavailability of the internet , or cost for a small percentage of people.




2:
6 % per year = 11.9 years to double.

2 years double = 41 % per year.

18 month double = 59 % per year.

at 2 % per year, it takes 35 years to double your initial amount.