all posts tagged 'rural america'

Darwin, the town trapped by dial-up internet


🔗 a linked post to bbc.co.uk » — originally shared here on

"We are not saying we want to be given anything," says resident Kathy Goss. "We found our own potential solutions and we are willing to pay what it takes to get the hardware installed."

If the target audience for your app/video/network/website is "everybody", then you have to keep people like this in mind. Just because they live in the middle on nowhere doesn't mean they are A) stupid or B) poor. They, very simply, might just lack the resources to have a high-speed internet connection.

It wasn't too long ago that we all were trapped by 56k connections. Hell, it was only 2006 that I had to leave my computer on overnight to download a CD, and that was a paltry 50 megabyte download. Today, you have websites serving up 150 megabyte video downloads or serving all their graphics as 3 megabyte JPEGs.

I try to remember those days as best I can while designing websites today. Get your users to the content as fast as humanly possible. Then go ahead and add all your HTML5 gobbledy-goo.

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