Dial-up connections endured a spectacular fall in 2008, declining 17.5% in Q4 and a huge 51.7% for the year.However there are still over 800,000 households using dial up, either because they are forced to, due to the lack of a DSL or fibre-optic broadband connection to their property, or because they choose to.We think that the latter group are crazy, as the service is clearly extremely poor relative to a broadband connection, and often more expensive.
Indeed we have written recently about the scandal of big trusted brands such as Tesco actively promoting a range of dial up connections to households who should know better than to buy them.Tesco still offer three different dial up packages with their “Anytime” package costing a whopping £12.22 per month excluding line rental.
The figures from the Office of National Statistics also showed that 95.1% of the 17million internet connections in the UK are now broadband enabled, up from 94.1% in September 2008, representing a 4.4% annual increase.Though the impact of the credit crunch seems also to being felt as some people dropped their internet access altogether in the last quarter of 2008, resulting in a 0.3% drop in the overall number of internet connections between September and December 2008.
The study also examined advertised speeds of broadband packages, showing that as at the end of December 59.6% of broadband packages had an advertised speed of more than 2Mb, up from 57.7 per cent in September 2008.