What he evidently didn't know is that DSL service, the sort ISPs provide to po' folks via their phone lines averages around 20 mbps in places out in the hinterlands where fiber optic and cable never goes. No big deal the gov decided. After all you can set up a much faster connection on Starlink for about $679 and $130 something a month if the Starlink satellites aren't at capacity as they are where I live. In my case, I live in South Hill, a suburb of Puyallup just east of Tacoma and just far enough south of Seattle that we can't actually hear the riots.
We're living in a garage apartment in the midst of a 25 acre patch of dense fir and cottonwood trees a quarter mile from the nearest street. DSL service is the only service that was available to us, until it wasn't. In an effort to avoid having to pay more in fines than they make in internet service fees, Centurylink, the only provider I could get for the past 12 years, has been getting rid of their DSL customers using a clever ruse consisting of simply waiting till a modem or line failed, scheduling a repair visit then canceling it and then repeating the process of not coming to repair your service again and again until enough time has passed that we have up, canceled our service and went looking for another ISP.
After I spent two months without service, buying a new computer because I thought at first I'd had an equipment failure, and being rejected by every cable, fiber optic and satellite provider in town. They told me I was too far from the road, trees block the satellite signal or the wireless service was at capacity or blocked by the trees. I tried to reup with DSL, but after being fined millions for doing to other customers what they did to me, CenturyLink refused to provide me service, though my landlord next door still gets DSL till the folks in Monroe, LA figure out how to get rid of him. To add insult to injury, "customer service" is trying to bill me for the rest of the second month my internet was nonfunctional. They'd already got payment for the first month of the blackout.
Xfinity did offer me affordable service, the waited 2 weeks and told me I had to run a fiber optic cable 700 feet through the woods, and it would only cost me a mere $25,000. The cable TV guys want $5,000 to run a cable back here. Most other types of service just say they don't cover this area, although a block or two in any direction, my neighbors on the other side of the woods get plenty of MBPS. The afore-mentioned Starlink might work, but they are at capacity and can't handle more customers without adding more satellites. And given the nasty way the liberal Democrats up here talk about Musk, I wouldn't blame him if he never again launched anything over the State of Washington that wasn't an EMP.
So today, I went to 3 cities, was told by Boost they couldn't at a Wifi hotspot that worked because they didn't carry the little box I needed, though they did sell me another phone line and an Internet connect that they said could give me up to 100 mbps speed at half the $150 a month that T-Mobile offered me using the same cell towers. Boost also said they could get me better speed (up to 200 mbps). They sent me to Best Buy which was about to close when my bus ride and an Uber reached their door. Best Buy said their phone guys were gone for the day, and they couldn't do it, so they sent me to WALMART! The Walmart guy couldn't do anything but sell me a Boost Mobile phone I could use for a wireless hotspot, he said. He did, however, explain the cheaper phone of the same brand would do the same thing for half the cost. (I love Walmart as much for their customer care people as for how much Wally World pisses off Democrats).
I got home and eagerly set up the new phone on the line Boost had already activated. When joy of joys, I got the wireless network set up and unlike the $40 hotspot box I'd got in just six weeks from Italy, the phone-based wireless hot spot proclaimed "internet connected."
Eagerly, I went over to Speakeasy to test my new improved Internet connection. Well, let's say the Boost customer service rep oversold the product. Instead of the 32 mbps the old DSL line got, my first test showed I was getting 1.2 mbps. I tested it 3 times off of different servers and the best I got was 7.1 mbps, which is what I got 13 years ago with CenturyLink DSL.
Turns out, the Internet superhighway is, at least in my neighborhood, under construction and likely to stay that way. I'm going to talk to a lawyer about suing CenturyLink for pushing me off their DSL service through nefarious business practices. If I can join a class action suit against CenturyLink for their bait and bail tech support practices, maybe I can get enough to buy my way onto Starlink. There is a hole in the forest canopy not far from the house that Starlink satellites cross over regularly. With Starlink, I could get more than a measley 40 GB of data per month.
Us two old people do almost everything online. We do all our shopping online, communicate with our family back in Texas, handle our medical stuff online, keep Amazon trucks coming back and forth several times a week, arrange transportation (gas is $5 a gallon here, tags are $400 a year and insurance is outrageous so who can afford a car) and I depend on the net to manage a sputtering freelance writing career to supplement our social security which, according to former president Biden is below the federal poverty line. After 40 years in the nonprofit sector, turns out they don't call it nonprofit for nothing. To add insult to injury, only a couple of TV stations get through the trees intermittently so we're stuck watching reruns of the Rifleman, Hawaii Five-O, the occasional random TV evangelist, Japanese newscasts, the weather in New England and on clear nights, an hour of QVC. We only saw two episodes of Jack Reacher and 5 of the Rookie before we lost the signal. I'm hoping that 2-6 mbps will allow us to finish streaming a movie.
Tom King
