Skinnyband Internet

Have you ever wanted to reminisce about what it was like to use the internet in 1994? Well come to my house and you’ll find out. I moved out to the country four and a half years ago and have been relegated to using dial-up internet ever since then. Crappy dial-up internet at that. These past couple weeks I’ve been connecting at 21.6 kbs on good days and my connection lasts about half an hour if I’m lucky. Before I moved out to the country I was making good use of a cable internet connection to manage several websites, play plenty of online games, and discover all the new music that the internet made available to people.

It was quite a shock to my mental state moving into the country and not having access to high speed. DSL wasn’t available. The cable company wanted a fortune to run cable to my house. Satellite internet is ridiculously expensive for cheap DSL-like speeds. Cellular companies offer internet service but again the price and quality are crummy. And so during these long four and a half years I have struggled to make do. Managed my websites as best as possible and have had dozens of internet business ideas that I killed before I even started them because I knew that most of them just weren’t feasible on dial-up. I also haven’t bought a computer game during that entire time because most games these days are heavily oriented towards online play.

A couple months ago I hatched a plan to have the cable company come to my house and run the cable line as close as they would for free and then I would run it the rest of the way. Well I never heard back from them. They were supposed to come and do a survey but someone dropped the ball. So a couple weeks ago I called them again and set up for a new survey…and never heard from them. Once again I was abandoning my hopes of a better internet and began to plan to write this article about my internet plight and all of the options available (crummy as they are) for someone in my situation.

But then something spectacular happened. The cable company called me and said they would run cable to my house! No huge charges for running the line or anything. And then something spectacularly devastating happened. The installer showed up and said he couldn’t do it. That who ever surveyed the house must not have actually checked it out to see if there was a line already heading back to the house from the road. This article was supposed to be the first article I published from my cable connection but instead I am currently connected on dial-up at 16.8 kbs.

The installer said he would contact the construction department and see if it was possible but I’m not too hopeful at the moment. This is indeed a sad day in internet land.


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