Flung back 10 years and hurting
posted in Technology Zen, Wifi/Internet/Broadband |I’m facing a reality that many people live with every day (like my parents.) And I thought I could live with it. I thought it would be fine. I thought …
What is it? No broadband.
Where I’ll be living quite soon is in, as some have called it, “the land time forgot” - Shutesbury, Massachusetts. It’s a great rural town, with not a lot of people (population 1900). But the people are spread out far enough that neither the cable company, nor the phone company finds it worth it to install the infrastructure for broadband. And, cell phones don’t work there either, so any cell-based broadband is out, too.
My options seem to be:
- Live with dial-up and wait for the powers that be (Verizon, Comcast, someone else) to finally offer broadband
- get really sucky satellite internet at astronomical prices with long contracts, and very extreme download limits (possibly too low to even bother with)
- become my own ISP by getting a T1 and sharing it by WiFi or some other method (if that will even work, given how far our neighbors are from us.)
So, all I can say is that this seems to be a great opportunity for thinking deeply about what’s important to me. There are things I take so completely for granted, like Skype, downloading big Linux ISOs, bittorrenting video files, etc. that I won’t be able to do anymore, unless I pretty much go with option 3. Options 1 and 2 will limit what I can do fairly dramatically. Is all of that worth it enough for me? I can pretty much do any work I need to do with dial up (in fact, satellite will make things like doing SSH sessions impossible - so that’s another mark against it.) I could rent an office in town. I can go to Rao’s, or the Book Mill a few times a week. I could be patient - waiting for technology to catch up.
As a Buddhist teacher might say: it’s all fodder for practice. In this case, practicing patience, and getting used to going to get tea while websites load.
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