I was asked last week how we ended up getting internet where I live while most others have to accept either DSL or satellite. To date, there has only been one article on the Net dealing with the subject and it really only scratched the surface. In time I will relate the story; however, I began to think about the sad state of affairs technologically speaking in rural America.
For quite sometime now corporate monopolies such as AT&T, Frontier Communications, Time Warner and Comcast, backed by American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have been dictating to rural and to a major extent metropolitan communities what they are allowed to use and ensuring that the pricing is at a premium. The sad reality is this:
Corporate megaliths such as the Big 4 are the reason why Osama bin Laden had faster internet than most of the United States!
“The US has not made significant improvement in the speeds at which residents connect to the Internet.” Our nation continues to fall far behind other countries.”
“People in Japan can upload a high-definition video in 12 minutes, compared to a grueling 2.5 hours at the US average upload speed.”
18 percent of those who took a US speed test recorded download speeds that were slower than 768 kilobits per second, which does not even qualify as basic broadband, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
In our instant case high speed internet is not a convenience, it is a necessity! Our interactions with both the federal government and global financial institutions require both voluminous and real time communications. Too bad the Big 4 didn’t hear about that!
