How Important is the Internet?

Have you thought about this recently? For most of the people I know it is an integral part of their lives. And our dependence on it is increasing every day.

So what would you do without it? What would you read or watch? How would you communicate? Can you imagine actually paying for a long distance call?

We've hit a SNAFU. I sort of saw this one coming, but held out hope that by the time it was properly investigated there'd be a solution. The property we're looking at is so far out in the boonies there is no broadband Internet available. The choices are basically dial up or something from a company called HughesNet. The good news is that HughesNet does qualify as broadband, so it can be done. The bad news is they are the only game in town if you want a fast connection, and they know it, so it is priced accordingly. To get speeds near what I've been used to it will cost us almost $200 per month, and they still have lots of limitations...like a 500 MB per day maximum. Yikes, can't even download a whole movie with that. And they have a pretty horrible reputation for outages and downtime...probably exacerbated by how much people are paying them. It's satellite based so a hard rain (gee, we never get those in Indiana, eh?) is going to cause problems, etc.

There are cheaper options, but the speeds get down well below what we've had for the last 10 years or so. We're still investigating whether there might be some other options, but it doesn't look good. Can we really take this step backwards in our connectivity? And can we really rationalize that kind of money to stay reasonably connected?

Sigh...

You'd think this day and age we'd be a little further along with this stuff.