Slightly Random Mind

In many rural areas of the United States, it is difficult to get anything beyond dial-up Internet access.  The problem is that most phone companies have little incentive to expand DSL to sparsely populated areas.  The only people who seem to be able to get DSL are those lucky enough to have a COOP instead of a large corporation providing service.

The farm where I grew up has this problem.  We’ve tried a number of different solutions.  At first we just had a dedicated line for Internet set to automatically dial whenever someone tried to access the Internet.  This worked ok, but was very slow. Finally we switched over to Wild Blue’s satellite service.  It worked ok, but had very low limits on usage and the latency was very bad.  When you clicked on a page, it took quite awhile for the signal to make it up to the satellite, back down, to the server, back to the satellite and back down to our dish.  Satellites are just a long ways away and the radio delay is very noticeable.

Eventually I started looking into EVDO cards.  It wasn’t available at the farm, but there was a tower about 20 miles away. My goal was to use a cell phone booster and a 30 foot tower to try to connect with the EVDO signal in an adjacent state. Fortunately before I spend all the money on the cell phone booster, Sprint went live with a tower just a few miles from the farm.  This worked well until Sprint decided to impose a limit on the data used each month.

More recently we’ve switched to using Virgin’s pay as you go plan for Internet.  It is only $40 per month (much cheaper than Sprint) and since everything uses the Sprint network, we still haven’t had to buy the cell phone booster we thought we’d need to keep everything running.

Strangely enough, my house in town which is closer to the local antenna has a worse signal and it looks like we may need some type of cell phone booster there in order to fix the problems we are having with dropped calls. At that location I also have an EVDO connection for backup when the cable company messes up their service (which happens a few times each month). It seems to get a pretty good signal, but I can put the access point in the attic where there seems to be less interference and it seems to get a good clear signal without any type of booster or amplifier.

If you have internet access it is easy to take it for granted, but people with out good access face a lot of limitations.  This is particularly true in the area of education.  If you are located in an area with limited internet options, it is fairly likely that your educational options are limited as well. Online classes and degrees are particularly helpful to someone who is living in a rural area that would require a 2 or 3 hour commute to the nearest university.  Internet access for these areas of the country can be the difference between getting an education and not.

Whats frustrating is that telephone companies have been given huge tax breaks to bring internet to rural areas, but it simply hasn’t materialized.  Areas that are serviced by coops seem to be able to get DSL and cable connections in rural areas, but places serviced by the larger better funded companies can’t seem to get internet to farmers and other rural areas. I’m not a big fan of government controlling what these companies do, but we need to at least hold them to providing what they have been basically paid to provide.