Internet

Love it! Hate it!
We've had a lot of phone problems over the last few months and it really points out some of the weak spots in our new technology. We depend more and more on being connected to the internet for everything from staying up to date on the news to shopping. When the internet is down it is more annoying to me then if the television is broken. This last weekend we lost phone service because of the snow storm. So using my cell phone I called in the trouble reporting that our line was dead. They confirmed it was dead and said someone would get on it. Late Saturday afternoon I noticed we had a dial tone but still no internet. I figured they were working on it so I didn't call again. Sunday morning we still didn't have internet so I tried to call but the line was so bad I couldn't get through. Then it mysteriously cleared up so I report that our DSL had been out since the phone went out on Saturday. They hadn't been told of an outage but would look into it. First she tells me to reboot the modem so she can see it connect but when I do she says she can't see the modem. Finally she says she is updating something and boom, we have internet again. While we were without internet it was easy to see how dependent we have become on it. We don't even get a newspaper anymore because I can read most of it online plus I can read out of town newspapers too. I use the online TV listings provided by Zap2it.com to plan our evening TV viewing and to schedule my homemade DVR for HDTV. This blog can only be updated when I am on the network and both Mary and I have started using GoogleDoc for some things. She does a lot of volunteer work for LibraVox.org which is a nonprofit outfit that is putting public domain books into mp3 files for people who want to listen to books, for one reason or another, instead of reading them themselves. Once again though you have to have the internet to up and down load the files and since she coordinates who is reading what she needs her email to communicate with people from around the world. In this country internet providers boast about their 4 and 8mbps (megabit per second) premium connections. In countries like Japan and many European countries they have 100mbps connections and they cost a fraction of what the best connections in this country cost. On one of my Linux forums a guy was telling how he pays $79.00 a month for a 4mbps connection in New York and when he goes to Europe, which he does quite often, he gets a 70mbps connection for about $10.00 per month. I pay almost $70.00 a month for a measly 768kbps connection that has a 10 gigabyte per month limit. Up here there is only one broadband solution through MTA telephone company. I could use satellite but that is very unreliable up here due to weather and how low on the horizon the satellites are and pretty expensive too.
I was reading an article by John Dvorac who is kind of a guru of the PC world and he was commenting on it doesn't matter if you have a 10 gigabit connection, the way the internet is designed if you are trying to pull something off a server that only has a 512kbps connection that is a fast as it is going to come down. Also the more popular the site the more connections it has to handle and the slower it can handle them. That's why when watching YouTube sometimes it stops every few seconds. So I just hope that before all the news papers stop publishing paper copy and TV stations stop broadcasting over the air signals that someone upgrades the internet backbone so we all aren't sitting watching those little spinning timers that show up on YouTube all the time waiting for the clip to get buffered.
Time to go to the post office and drop off our last Netflix. Later....