Pedestrian-paced internet common in Japan
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Despite Japan having just about the cheapest and fastest home internet connections on the planet, this recent survey from iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com into home internet connections found the vast majority felt their pipes got quite blocked.
Demographics
On the 14th of December 2009 300 members of the iBridge Research Plus monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.3% of the sample were male, 13.0% in their twenties, 26.7% in their thirties, 35.3% in their forties, 17.0% in their fifties, and 8.0% in their sixties.
Despite 91.3% being on some form of broadband at home, nearly half reported a walking-speed connection. They may have low-end computers, but one cannot help wondering if 42% using Windows Explorer has anything to do with it? On my home PC, Opera flies, but my wife uses Internet Explorer 8 and it is ridiculously slow to create a new page (I’d vote tortoise rather than walking…), a combination of her having too many bookmarks and, I suspect, Rakuten toolbar.
Research results
Of the sample, 295 people, or 98.3%, had internet connections at home, and 274 people, or 91.3% of the whole sample or 92.9% of the people with internet connections, used ADSL, CATV (cable) or FTTH (Fibre To The Home).
Q1: When do you usually use the interent at home? (Sample size=295, multiple answer)
Votes Percentage Weekday early mornings 69 23.4% Weekday mid-mornings 86 29.2% Weekday afternoons 111 37.6% Weekday evenings 231 78.3% Weekday nights 89 30.2% Weekend early mornings 47 15.9% Weekend mid-mornings 120 40.7% Weekend afternoons 143 48.5% Weekend evenings 164 55.6% Weekend nights 79 26.8% Almost never, never use 4 1.4% Q2: When do you feel the internet is slow? (Sample size=295, multiple answer)
Votes Percentage Weekday early mornings 14 4.7% Weekday mid-mornings 19 6.4% Weekday afternoons 22 7.5% Weekday evenings 82 27.8% Weekday nights 24 8.1% Weekend early mornings 6 2.0% Weekend mid-mornings 19 6.4% Weekend afternoons 46 15.6% Weekend evenings 79 26.8% Weekend nights 28 9.5% Don’t know 117 39.7% Q3: At its slowest, what speed is your home connection? (Sample size=295)
Walking pace 43.6% Bicycle 24.1% Car 5.8% Bullet train 2.7% Airplane 0.7% Supersonic 0.7% Light speed 1.0% Don’t know 21.3%
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Hmmm, yes, my Japanese friends who are PC users have about 3 different toolbar things they allowed to install themselves. D: Yikes! It’s quite slow.
My other closest Japanese friends are Mac users running Firefox or Safari.
Theirs is fast.
You’ve hit the nail on the head there with the suggestion of ‘user error’, for want of a better term. I’m consistently astonished at the mess people keep their computers in here and am thinking about charging a call-out fee for the frequent cries for help (i.e. installing Firefox and cleaning the general bloat) I get from friends and relatives! It’s close to scandalous the way most new PCs (not all, of course) are supplied dripping with toolbars, trial software and the like, all of it crap.
Walking pace thru Light speed? gimme a break, average throughput figures would have been more revealing (time to load a complex test page, perhaps).
agree with you and previous commenters though, adding toolbars, extensions and plugins, to the browser does not help.