NOT ME!
As reported by The Register half of the US should be using broadband by early 2004, this is effectively in line with Jakob Nielsen's prediction back in 1998, reported in his UseIT column: Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth.
In the UK the position is a little different.... BT our resident telco, tenaciously holds on to it's copper monopoly. The UK has one of the poorest levels of local-loop unbundling in Europe, and we have only 60% population coverage with ADSL technology. The position is so bad that some of BT's competitors are considering legal action.
One ray of sun-light in the seemingly unending fog of dial-up only net access has been the roll out of "no-frills" services, and almost reasonable prices. As prices have fallen, and consumers have been free to choose their own hardware, uptake has risen, and the various ADSL operators are falling over themselves to sign people up.
However I am not a happy ADSL bunny, for I am in the poor ADSL-have-nots, the 40% of British homes that are not to be offered ADSL connections, for we are not profitable for BT. The village I live in is deemed by BT to be too small for them to profitably install ADSL in the exchange here. So even though I live less than 100m from what seems to be a modern digital exchange I can't have ADSL!
Now you would think that as BT has a monopoly, then as a regulated industry the regulator would oblige them to offer a universal service, but apparently that is not the case either. I wouldn't mind so much if I could choose cable, or fixed-wireless, but neither of these are available either. To rub salt in the wound, dial-up charges have risen by ã1(~USD1.50) per month - even if you can't get ADSL!
I'm forced to use a V90 modem, and be happy customer.... Like many other places, we as poor country peasants, are forced to write to our elected representatives, parade naked though the streets and beg for mercy from our corporate over-lords.
According to Nielsen the internet needs to be fast for good usability, and having just downloaded the latest OpenSSH version I can testify that a V90 modem is not fast!
END RANT...
