Posts Tagged ‘high speed data’
Finally Connected
Ten years ago today, October 18 was the very day of our arrival to this property we call Wintervale. Hoorah! I looked up our property on the county site and grabbed a couple of images from the widest span of dates available.
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On the left is the year 2010 which was two years before we purchased the property. On the right is from 2021 according to the county.
I prefer the images our friend Mike Wilkus provided from his recent flyover.
I was hiking the north loop trail with Delilah, waiting for the arrival of our in-home broadband internet installer to finally connect us to the world of streaming content, and spotted this scene of pine needles carpeting the ground.
I’m sure glad that tree isn’t over our landscape pond.
As can be seen from the view perspective of Mike’s photo above, there are cultivated crop fields around us, keeping us aware that we live among farmers.
Yesterday the closest field to our south was being harvested. Something tells me we aren’t in the suburbs anymore.
That’s quite all right with me, …especially now that we are hardwired with fiber optic broadband.
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Within Weeks
Indications hint at our fiber broadband connection coming within 4-6 weeks. We’ve been waiting for about a year since our rural Pierce Pepin electric cooperative announced the launch of a new subsidiary, Swiftcurrent Connect, to provide high-speed internet service to members.
Tuesday evening I received an email announcing it was time to sign up for the connection to our house. I logged in and signed up immediately. Just 12 hours later, Cyndie reported seeing a utility truck on our road.
They were hanging fiber optic cable on our electric poles. By the end of the day, I noticed a drop from the pole on the other side of our driveway, coiled up and ready for connection to a line to be buried alongside our electric supply up to the house.
I don’t mean to be greedy, but I’m really hoping we don’t have to wait the full number of weeks for that line to the house to be installed. Maybe the fact that the cable showed up on our electric pole about the same time they contacted me for sign-up is a good sign of their efficiency.
Either way, our wanting something like this for the ten years we’ve been here makes waiting a few more weeks seem like something we should be able to handle. Soon, we will be able to discontinue delivery of Blu-ray discs from Netflix through U.S. snail mail for our movie entertainment desires.
I look forward to being able to update software without fretting over consuming the majority of our allotted monthly data. We have been living under the arbitrary limitations of GB of data per dollar I was willing to pay. Our service provider gladly offered to sell us more full-speed data whenever we used up our initial 15 GB in a month but it was at what I felt was an excessive price.
Feels a little like we are catching up with the current century. Or, it will in a few weeks or so.
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Slowly Approaching
We’re talking fiber, baby. A cable of optical fibers to carry data in pulses of light. It will be buried alongside the electric cables that already bring power to our house. Our rural community is slowly but surely being connected to the global information highway bringing speeds that have been the norm for people in cities and suburbs for years.
On my bike ride last week, I found the spot where they had stopped for the day and was thrilled to see the optical cable getting ever closer to our street.
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On Saturday, as Cyndie and I were walking Delilah around the hayfield fence by the road, a utility car stopped and a technician got out to survey the power poles along our street. I was able to chat with the guy and learn the phases that remain before we will finally get connected. It will be longer than we wish but it’s closer than ever.
Until then, it’s cell signals and 15GB of full-speed data per month limits. If we use that up, they throttle our speeds to insufferable levels. A fate that they offer to lift if we agree to give them more money. I’m too cheap to give in to that ploy.
Hassles and limitations that seem more tolerable with the pending improvement becoming more visible on our horizon every day.
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Relative Something 