High-Speed Internet, At Last
When me lived in Texas, we chose not to live in Austin–the city where we worked and played–but in Georgetown, one of its suburbs. With 60,000 residents, Georgetown is a small city by Texas standards, with the requisite Walmart, grocery store, and a handful of specialty stores. It also happens to be a nice college town, very quiet, and with beautiful houses, which is why we chose to live there in the first place. When we moved to Wyoming, we decided to avoid living in Laramie, instead moving to Jelm, a beautiful, quiet, pristine part of the world. That’s worked out well, expect for one little thing: Internet access. But finally, after a long wait, we have high-speed Internet at home!
It’s odd really that it took us so long, just over four years, to get high-speed Internet where we live. When we first moved, Mona was telecommuting to Austin, so a high-speed, low-latency connection was important. We had little choices: DSL and cable are both out of the question where we live. Our only option was ISDN, which is “high-speed” only to those who don’t know any better.
We settled for ISDN for a couple of years, but eventually we had to give it up. Our ISP went through some changes, and the new management decided to discourage ISDN dialup–by charging $150/month for the privilege. So we scaled our service down to basic dialup, nominally 28Kbps, but in practice more like 18Kbps. It was absolutely painful. Since we have more computers than people at our house, we shared this connection all over the house with a wireless access point. Nobody was happy, but there wasn’t much we could do about it.
Oh sure, we looked into a satellite connection. But that required a hardware configuration that we did not have–a PC running Windows.
And then everything changed. WildBlue, a new internet satellite company, came into town, displacing DirecWay’s stranglehold with our electric coop. Many people must have had the same idea, because we had to wait a while before the installer could make it to our house. But he did yesterday, and we hooked up our wireless access point to the WildBlue device. Voila! Wireless, high-speed internet at home! We stayed up a while playing with it last night, and I’m happy to say that it was perfect. I don’t know how we lived without it.