An oral survey of high-speed-data customers -- mostly early
adopters -- showed them to be satisfied with current services and ready for telephony and
video as the next high-speed toys to play with.
The survey, conducted by turnkey high-speed-data provider
Convergence.com, was fielded to 220 data customers who called into the company's
"help desk" over a two-week period spanning late September and early October.
Of the respondent group, which largely described itself as
"supersurfers" and "Web heads" (74 percent), the interest level for
advanced services over high-speed-data platforms was mixed:
24 percent said they want IP (Internet-protocol)
telephony;
22 percent said they want movies on-demand;
17 percent want live streaming video;
17 percent want video e-mail; and
17 percent want videoconferencing.
Terry Wright, founder and chief technology officer for
Convergence.com, said those results reflected the overall demographics for early adopters,
noting that those desired services were in response to an open-ended question, and not to
a specific list of new services.
"We've had people call the help desk and say,
'OK, I have this cable modem, what else can I do with it,' besides Web
surfing?" Wright said.
Not surprisingly, the respondents were hopelessly
infatuated with the speed and the always-on connections enabled by cable modems.
A whopping 98 percent of current cable-modem users said
they would recommend cable-modem-based Internet access to friends, and 93 percent of all
respondents said the service "meets or exceeds [their] expectations."
When asked to compare their new, high-speed Internet access
to dial-up alternatives, 52 percent qualified Internet-over-cable as "the speed of
light versus the speed of molasses." Another 42 percent compared the experience to
"modems on steroids versus modem on Valium." Only 5 percent characterized the
two services as equal, and none said dial-up was better.
"This lighthearted survey clearly demonstrates that
cable-modem users appreciate their newfound ability to speed," Wright said.
"From the consumer's standpoint, competing Internet-access technologies simply
do not measure up."
