Like FTP, it still has a use.
But people are still attracted to "oooh, bright shiny thing!" rather than the spartan.
People using it for binary downloads can pull down data at gigabit speeds.
> it should still be kept as a no-frills alternative when things have to depend on low-bandwidth.
It's unfortunate that most websites and other services require significant amounts of bandwidth. If I'm using a GPRS connection on my phone, websites other than Hacker News are not really usable. IRC and Usenet still work though.
> People using it for binary downloads can pull down data at gigabit speeds.
Sorry. I wasn't clear. I meant that being a 'store and forward' medium rather than a broadcast medium, it can take days to propagate to all clients, rather than talking specifically about the speed of transmission.