I waited a few days on this post, so I can have a real taste of things
before commenting; and now I that I have, I am. Two days ago we finally
got DSL installed. Prior to that, there was no landline to the property.
We had been using a Verizon Wireless Aircard to dial in to their 3G
network, and it was pitiful. Slow, expensive, and unstable as hell. Many
days we were offline more often than we were on. We endured that for
four years because there was, quite literally, nothing else available in
this rural neighborhood. But I guess it's a little less rural now, and I
have no complaints about that.
The "why" of our living situation over the years is convoluted, so I
won't get into it right now. I just wanted to post up something, though,
to describe how it feels to go from a service that was demonstrably
worse than dial-up, to one that is closer to what most people would
consider an acceptable level of quality. To go from a broken crawl, to a
decent walking stride, in other words. Speedtest.net, just this moment,
is showing 3.17Mb/s down, and 0.31Mb/s up. By modern standards that
isn't really awesome. By our personal standards, however, it's blazing.
We were used to speeds that varied between nothing (no connection at
all) to 30 Kb/s down on a good day. Upload speeds were, naturally,
commensurately worse. And all of this with a 5GB monthly bandwidth cap.
You read that right. So, to go from that to this is a beautiful thing.
There's just no other way to describe it.
I watched Hulu.com for the first time last night; that may not seem like
much to you, but it was a first for me. I can now torrent CC movies (I
recommend the impressive -- and near-zero-budget -- gangster
film/mystery/character study, "Emperor"). I can now download the
distros of my choice. When these things come to you, like water in a
desert, you see the digital world in a different way. Broadband access
MUST be seen as a basic service that all people have a need for and a
right to, like electricity and modern plumbing. How governments of the
world will face that fact in the years to come, I don't know, but the
network infrastructures in place will be a hard measure of the quality
of nations. Sporadic or expensive coverage; reactionary or draconian
laws and policies; outdated software and hardware: these things will
determine the relative poverty of a place.
Oh, you can live without quality access, certainly, but you'll be that
much closer to "just surviving"; you'll be stuck in a more primitive
time. That's where WE were, and I won't do it any more. I won't raise
my son this way. It IS extremely important, and must be acknowledged in
all our future plans. Slow, unreliable service is simply unacceptable
from here on out. No matter where our goals lead from now on, that
basic truth comes with us.
