Broadband: Family-life essential?

To some families, having high-speed Internet access is like having electricity and running water. In her readable way, the New York Times's Katie Hafner shows what life is like in households that have had broadband connections for years. She talked to families in Scripps Ranch, "a sprawling development of about 12,000 homes at the northeast corner of San Diego" and one of Time Warner's first test locations for its high-speed Road Runner service. For example, in the Gibb home, "the large, airy upstairs den ... is the electronics hub, filled with computers, printers, a cable modem and a router. Downstairs are another two computers and a printer. Everything is on a network. Each of their 13-year-old twin sons, Morgan and Cayman, has his own computer, and neither can remember life without broadband," Katie writes. The boys could do without TV, but - like many teenagers these days - not without the Net, which makes grounding from cyberspace a much more effective disciplinary tool than the kind we baby boomers had to deal with when teenagers. When Morgan lost IM privileges for a month, he "went nuts," his mother told Katie.