.S. situation with that in other developed nations, it might be more useful to look at the diffusion rate for broadband alongside other revolutionary consumer technologies over the past fifty years. Figure 8-5 does this for television, cable television, the video- cassette recorder (VCR), and the personal computer (PC). Note that broad- band (shown by the heavy line) compares favorably with the VCR and the PC but lags behind television receivers. Thus the diffusion of broadband is not much different from the patterns of other notable technological break- throughs. The case of cable television is particularly interesting because its growth was restrained by oppressive FCC regulation in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever the deleterious impacts of regulation on broadband, they clearly have not been as bad as those imposed by the FCC on cable television. Demand for Broadband Internet Connections Hanging over the entire broadband debate is a concern that many house- holds simply do not want the service at prices of $40 or more a month. Several years ago, Hal Varian and his colleagues at the University of California performed an experimental analysis of the demand for band- width in Internet connections. 17 Using members of the University of California community as subjects, they offered Internet connections at var- ious speeds up to 128 kilobits per second at various prices. They found that The Broadband Revolution Figure 8-4. U.S. Broadband: Forecast by Type of Carrier, 2002-08 Percent Other DSL ILEC-DSL Cable Source: Morgan Stanley (March 2004). Figure 8-5. Diffusion Rates for New Consumer Technologies Percent Television Broadband Cable TV Years available Source: Bruce Owen, "Broadband Mysteries," in Broadband: Should We Regulate High-Speed Internet Access? edited by Robert W. Crandall and James H. Alleman (Brookings, 2002), fig. 2.1, updated by the author. The Broadband Revolution few of their subjects were willing to pay more than $0.01 a minute, or less than $1 an hour, for the time saved in using the Internet. One r