Never Underestimate The Bandwidth Of A Subaru Outback

I've done this:

When the weather interferes with his satellite Internet connection, and Kyle Houchens has a deadline to meet, he loads his laptop into his car and drives to his father's house to use his wireless connection.

Sometimes, he drives to the Williston rest area on Interstate 89 to use the wi-fi there. "It's kind of a ridiculous way to do business," he said.

Good on our GOP gov (for whom I vote) for getting the hint:

That cry is ringing in the ears of politicians in Montpelier. Gov. Jim Douglas last month proposed a plan to create a Vermont Telecommunications Authority that would help bring broadband and cellular telephone service to every patch of Vermont by 2010, making the state the first to have border-to-border coverage. Details of that proposal hit the desks of legislators last week.

Whether the 2010 deadline is feasible remains to be seen. Legislators are expressing concerns about making sure the state is neither duplicating services already in the works nor building a network that will be technologically obsolete before it's done. They plan to hire a consultant of their own who can provide technical advice.

The need for better service, though, is not in debate.

Right now I'm on dialup.  I have DirecPC, but a billing snafu several months back when my ex-wife's company stopped paying for it killed my service, and I've had nothing but trouble with their crappy customer service so I've done nothing about it since.  Not much reason to because my biggest issue is uploading podcasts, lectures, and other large files and the upstream bandwidth is no better than dialup.

Sometimes I'll drive into town and snag WiFi access at a cafe on Church Street, or use the campus network or whatever--I've even simply parked in front of my office building in Colchester and spent 10 minutes posting files without leaving the car (fortunately nobody's ever called the cops).  Even though it takes 30 minutes one way to get there, that's still significantly faster many times than waiting for the upload on my dialup.

I am hopeful that maybe with Verizon's selling VT (along with NH and ME) to Fairpoint, we might have DSL options in a year or so.  And now that Comcast has taken over Adelphia's customers here, I note that cable is just a few miles from my house, so maybe I can convince them to extend it just a bit further. 

Otherwise, I gotta move closer to town...

ntodd

Comments

[Chris Tucker]

Comcast digital is the pits. Customer service is clueless. If they don't have a script for your particular problem, you're screwed.

Hold out, if you can, for Fairpoint to either offer DSL. If they use the same hardware infrastructure and call center in India, you'll be just fine.

Getting DSL running on the diverse Macs I have was fairly simple, once I got rid of all the old and archaic Ethernet extensions in one Mac. Ethernet NuBus? How long had THAT been sitting in the Extensions folder, System 6? System7?

The call center people were on the ball and had good scripts. I was online in about 5 minutes.