[StBernard] TRUE 912: Bamboo Sticks =:-O | Rural Electrification, Meet the Internet | The Schussing Life

Westley Annis westley at da-parish.com
Sun Dec 11 10:44:34 EST 2011


Sound just like what that grand from the Feds for rural broadband was going
to do; i.e. serve the underserved rural areas with broadband. And it sounds
like the same argument the Jindal admin was using for *not* using the grant.
Duh!




>>Now, early in the 21st century, there's a similar problem in rural

parts of the U.S. Cities have broadband Internet, but it's much more
lacking in rural areas -- including where I live. When I moved to western
Colorado, I started with a satellite Internet connection. It sucked, thanks
to the lag time of bouncing my signal off a satellite
22,300 miles above me. The "round-trip light-time" to go that far is about
a half second ... for ... every ... command ... or ... handshake ...
request. Considering getting just one e-mail takes several such
handshake/pings/command trips back and forth, that's several seconds per
e-mail, multiplied by the 200-300 e-mails I get, and it adds up.
(And don't even ask about web surfing!)

Many of you can relate, I'm sure.

Now I use a ridiculously complex scheme to get online: Rube Goldberg would
be proud! But it beats my interim solution: paying $535 per MONTH for a T-1
line (1.54 MBPS each way), which these days is a pretty narrow pipe for
"broad"band! I could afford to pay that when ad space in TRUE cost $700,
during the "dotcom craze". That was then, this is now.

The result is in the U.S., where the Internet was invented, is falling WAY
behind other countries. We're not even in the Top 10 of per capita
availability of broadband, so this is far from just a "rural problem".







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