ANTHROPOLOGY
Curious about how consumers were using its Road Runner broadband modems, cable operator MediaOne recently sent a pair of anthropologists into subscribers' homes. The duo, Ken Anderson and Anne McClard, found shifts in PC and Net usage.
The two compared 11 households in New England with Road Runner service and five homes in Colorado with dialup connections. Their findings? Computers hooked to cable modems were online nearly five times longer (an average of 22.5 versus 4.7 hours a week). And although high-speed service was generally ordered by the tech head of the household, those who hadn't spent much time online before turned out to be heavier users of the service. "We saw broader use in the family," notes Anderson.
Among the various lifestyle changes was a tendency among cable-modem customers to move their computers into living rooms, dining rooms, and kitchens. McClard and Anderson noted other, subtler differences, too. "Dialup people refer to the Internet as 'out there' and talk about 'going out on the Internet,'" Anderson says. "People using the cable service didn't do that. They were thinking of CNN.com as just another app."
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