As I sat by our campfire thinking about going in to get on the Internet, I contemplated the pokey speed I was going to have. Here at our cabin it is 24,000 kbps with rural dial-up. In Duluth we have 1.5 mbps DSL. That's 62.5 times as fast as in the woods.
BTW, not all our friends here have to put up with that. They live within two or three miles of the substation and can get DSL. I don't know what the rated speed is, but I would assume at least 256 kbps, more than 10 times what we get eight or so miles from the substation.
What boggles my mind is that Twin Cities businesses can get 100 mbps with Comcast cable. That is about 66 times as fast as we get in Duluth and over 4,000 times as fast as we get in the woods!
According to Magree's first law of computing, as these faster speeds become more widely available, web page designers will design for those speeds and faster. Access to many sites will become even more slow in Duluth, and it will become hopeless to do much more than email from the cabin.
BTW, it took over nine minutes to get to the page to post this entry!
