Posts Tagged ‘rural connectivity’
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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Weak Link
There are many days when the Wintervale connection to the world via the internet is annoyingly flakey. The problem is mysterious and invisible, frequently interrupting progress in the middle…
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Hi, I’m back. That’s the way this works. After a seemingly interminable pause, activity resumes as if nothing is amiss. You wouldn’t notice a thing, unless you were attempting to visit with others via Zoom.
“Your internet connection is unstable.”
As soon as that message appears, even as I rush to write a chat message to everyone to explain that I could hear them all even though my image may have frozen to them, my fate is doomed to closing and then immediately reconnecting, minus all the text I had just entered in the chat window.
It’s life in the country. For all the advantages we enjoy living out among farm fields and forests, it comes at the expense of having a reliable internet connection. The industry can’t balance the economics of running fiberoptic cable to handfuls of houses scattered across many wide miles.
We don’t stream. We rent DVDs through the mail.
If we want to accomplish something without interruption, it takes a lucky combination of atmospheric conditions and an absence of too much competition for the limited bandwidth. Oh, and we can’t have already exceeded our cap of monthly allotted usage.
In all of the Zoom meetings I have participated in over the last month, I was the weakest link.
It’s too bad because I love the possibility of connecting with my multiple remote communities, but I love living where we do even more.
Cyndie pointed out that our new openings around the two big oak trees beside the driveway allow for excellent viewing of the rising moon.
Since our internet browsers weren’t having much success loading pages, we were more available to get out and enjoy the lunar view.
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Relative Something 