• by Masha Geller , February 14, 2003

Earlier this week, my esteemed colleague John Gaffney wrote about his recent move to a new house and how frustrating it was for him to get online with dial-up (DSL isn’t available is his area yet.)

John suggested that we, the advertising and marketing industry, team up and make dial-up really unpopular. “This ad and Internet industry needs to make dial-up hard to get, number one, instead of making it available through a disc at every supermarket in the country,” he wrote. “And it needs to work with a good agency to come up with a campaign that can show the differences. The ad business made sneakers into a cash crop. It made vodka elegant. Don’t tell me it can’t convince the American consumer that broadband is necessary.”

I agree to an extent. I, personally, have been so spoiled by high-speed access that it’s hard for me to imagine life without it. At the same time, it’s even harder for me to imagine my mother ever needing anything faster than a dial-up connection for what she does online (which is mainly email and very occasionally shop) -- the point being that there are plenty of consumers out there who simply don’t need broadband.

All that said, I stumbled across some stats today that show the number of DSL subscribers growing from 18.8 million worldwide at the end of 2001 to more than 36 million currently. Specifically in Q4 2002, one researcher estimates that 5.7 million DSL subscriber lines were added around the world.

Broken down into continents, as of the end of 2002, there were roughly 7.1 million DSL subscriber lines in the Americas (Latin America and North America). Slowly, but surely, broadband penetration is increasing.

So yes, rich media advertisers may be getting impatient, but all good things come to those who wait.