21 Million U.S. Broadband Customers as of November

Internet bandwidth seems to lead to a situation similar to what we've experienced with hard drive space. The more we have, the more determined developers are to use it up. Not that having big hard drives and DSL lines is bad, both certainly give us tremendous advantages. It just seems like applications have gotten more and more bloated as our drives have grown and web sites have become unnecessarily graphics-intensive as the assumption of higher bandwidth comes into play. Apparently, here in the U.S., more home users have broadband connections than ever before. The Internet ratings report for the month of November 2001 from Nielsen//NetRatings, an Internet audience measurement service, revealed that the total number of broadband users at-home in the U.S. surpassed 21 million during the month of November, setting an all-time high. One out of every five Internet users accessed the Internet via broadband connection, reaching a record 20 percent of 106 million active Internet users. The number of users accessing the Internet via a high-speed connection in November jumped 90 percent from 2000. By comparison, the active Internet universe grew 11 percent from November 2000 to 2001. Twenty percent of the active Internet population accessed the Internet via broadband in November, as compared to nearly 12 percent a year ago. According to Nielsen//NetRatings in November, 12.7 million broadband Internet users consumed streaming media content at-home, jumping 94 percent from the previous year. The overall streaming population grew 18 percent year-over-year from 34.4 million to 40.7 million. The proportion of broadband to narrowband streamers has continued to increase, growing to 31 percent of the total streaming population, as compared to 19 percent last year. I guess that means we can expect to more of those flashy useless splash pages.