Annoyed19k
@Dial1.Atla
| From my perspective
I used to live in a large city and had 5- Mbit cable access.
Then I moved to my brothers place out in the country.
Here it is 9 miles to the nearest gas station.
My BEST connection rate here via modem is 19Kbps.
Is broadband a utility, yes it is.
A utility is something you use to accomplish something but doesn't mean its required. Electricity , a utility, is necessary to use a clothes washer, but you don't have to have it to wash clothes. Similar with broadband. It is necessary for some things which are becoming mainstream, but there are alternative ways to accomplish the same task.
Some points to ponder:
People in rural areas have to have good transportation to access things like work, libraries, schools. I see lots of colleges offering on-line courses now. Out of reach for rural America.
Children in broadband homes have access to the internet to do research for school/homework. Something rural children have to rely on the library for, which can be an issue if you don't have transportation. Some will say , they can use dial-up to do the research. I suggest you give it a try .
You will find that more and more websites are catering to broadband users and designing there sites accordingly. Heavy
usage of graphics, plug-ins. You might say you can turn those off, well you can sometimes, other times the sites will not work because they have placed the menus in the graphics and the plug-ins. Graphics web site designers seem to no longer care about size/compression.
Voip . Do people in rural areas deserve to pay more for phone service because of where they live ?
On-line gaming. A dead concept for rural America.
Software updates. It used to be companies made downloads as small as possible for updates, fixes. Now the trend is to make it whatever size is easiest for them. Purchase a printer and there is a 45MB software update ? Most of which is because of the size of the installer, manual updates, pictures, etc. All stuff that could have been made available separately .Dial-up doesn't seem to matter anymore.
So is broadband a necessity. No. But it is MORE important to people in the rural areas than in the city where access to alternatives to using broadband are rampant.
The telcos need someone to give them a kick to get rolling on providing broadband to all, not just where its convenient.
I did contact the Telco here, Sprint about what options there were. They said they had no plans for broadband deployment here in the foreseeable future as the infrastructure just wasn't here. I laughed because 60 feet from my front door is telco boxes on the side of the road marked "Buried Fiber Optic Cable, call Sprint before digging". Surely that same fiber could at least carry 128k lines .
Products bought that now have slips of paper saying "go to www.companysite" to get the manual or ask for help. Same sites that are catering to broadband.
I'm not mad or jealous, just noticing how a new "digital divide" is developing between broadband and dial-up users.
I am actually grateful that I had the chance to go from broadband to dialup for now. Its given me the chance to see the divide happening that I otherwise would have overlooked. |
