Published: April 19, 2004

SAN FRANCISCO, April 18 — High-speed Internet access is being adopted by millions of Americans each year, growing as quickly as any modern technology. So what makes Dana Jenkins think she can resist?

In fact, she is part of another big group, the tens of millions of Americans seemingly immune to the lure of more speed and satisfied with dial-up services. A majority of Americans who surf the Internet still do so by dialing in on regular telephone lines, despite the rapidly narrowing price gap between high-speed and dial-up connections.

People like Ms. Jenkins are neither Luddites nor laggards, but consumers content to pay for a service that is less than optimal, and at times even frustratingly slow, because they say greater speed is not worth the trouble of starting over with a new telecommunications provider and getting a new e-mail address, even if the added cost is small.

"I resent it," said Ms. Jenkins, 61, an avid Internet user in Marietta, Ga., of the mild pressure she feels to get a high-speed connection. She pays $21.95 a month to dial into the Net — mostly to do research for the doctorate in communications that she is working toward — and said paying even $10 more for a faster connection would feel wasteful.

"I don't do gaming. I don't download a lot of graphics," she said. "For the money I would spend, I don't need it."

Those are words that can give high-technology industry executives chills. They have proclaimed the spread of high-speed, or broadband, connections to be integral to the industry's growth, essential to American competitiveness and indispensable to consumers. Even President Bush jumped into the fray last month, calling for affordable, universal high-speed access by 2007.

Up to now, the market for high-speed connections has been dominated by the young, educated, affluent and tech-savvy. In some circles, it is considered not just functional, but an essential bit of modernity, like knowing what happened on "The Sopranos" or that Diesel refers to jeans, not fuel. Some users of dial-up sheepishly acknowledge that they avoid admitting their low network speeds when they are with their better-connected friends.

The situation is likely to change as more users move to broadband. In 2003, 23 million households had high-speed access, up from 16 million the year before, according to the Yankee Group, a research firm. In 2003, 51 million American households connected to the Internet through a dial-up connection, down from 55 million a year before, the firm reported.

A typical dial-up connection delivers information at 56 kilobits a second; broadband connections are 5 to 25 times faster.

In practical terms, the performance depends largely on what task a person is doing. E-mail, for example, can take about the same amount of time to download, because it is a small amount of data. But high-speed connections can make a huge difference with the transfer of graphics, elaborate Web pages or video.

For those uses, the denizens of the dial-up world have learned to wait.

"I bring a newspaper and sit and read," said Alex Pope of Berkeley, Calif., explaining how he passes time waiting to download data, like the music programs for upcoming symphonies, on dial-up.

Mr. Pope, 74, a retired lawyer, does not have the option millions of dial-up users have: broadband connections at work that allow them to surf the Internet quickly when they need to. If office connections are counted, 55 percent of Americans have high-speed access, according to a study released on Sunday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit research group.

Danielle Kolko, 31, of Louisville, Colo., who works in the human resources department at a marketing company, is one who does high-speed surfing at the office. But some people in her social circle still give her grief about her slow-speed home life.

"I have friends who are high-tech computer engineers who are horrified by the fact I have dial-up," Ms. Kolko said. "I just tell them I'm more patient than they are."

While many dial-up users cite cost as one reason to stick with their existing service, the price of high-speed service is becoming more affordable.