Vermonter.com

Third world countries have high speed, broadband Internet access. Many areas of Vermont do not. I recently moved to Westford, Vermont and bid a fond farewell to the thing I loved most about my former home in Jericho…cable broadband ‘net access. Oh but the real estate agent said satellite Internet is supposed to be pretty good. Well, maybe for the casual user but not for someone who works on the ‘net! Wildblue and others have a usage cap on the amount you download/upload. Exceed your limits and they slow you down to dial-up speed for a lonnnggg time. To make matters worse, the cost is about double of cable. Then there’s the latency issue, etc.

So what am I using to post this latest rant? A Cingular wi-fi WWAN card. Also testing a Verizon wi-fi card as well. Better than dial-up and you can login just about anywhere you can get a cell phone signal but it’s still not high-speed (that privilege is reserved for big city folks not little towns in Vermont, not even Burlington). The word from Verizon is don’t hold your breath waiting because they have no plans to upgrade the cards to full broadband access in Vermont. Though they do plan to continue making us pay just as much as the folks in NYC though for 1/10 of the service.
So that’s my solution…for now. If you want to live the peaceful life in rural Vermont the best you can do might be a wireless card, unless you want to slog through with dial-up. Of course there’s always satellite Internet but you pay a lot more to get a lot less and the damn thing conks out when it rains…which is just about every other day in Vermont this summer.

God, what I wouldn’t give for an affordable T1 line!