Some tortoises have been left out

This weekend I got an inkling how bad things have gotten on the Internet for those out of reach of broadband. See "The tortoise and the hare of the Internet".

One of our Brimson circle of friends has been hospitalized for chemotherapy at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. His wife has set up a Caring Bridge site to keep family and friends up-to-date on his progress.

Although I was able to access their site twice from our cabin, others in the area were not so lucky. One had a time-out before the pages opened up, and another gave up before the pages completed.

Brimson is not exactly an economic powerhouse, but it is easy to understand why many across the nation are calling for rural broadband. Many of these people are working from their homes and doing more than logging or raising cabbages. They may be telecommuters or they may be running their own businesses. I assume they can become quite concerned about getting a report done or keeping their customers' orders.

Better rural service has already been provided in other countries, often with the help of U.S. corporations. A farming community in northern Iceland has, of April 2009, access to 4 mbps always-on wireless Internet access for about $70/month. The community consists of about 200 farms in an area about 25 miles across. See "Wireless Mesh Delivers Ultra-Fast Broadband to Underserved Areas in Iceland".

The tortoise and the hare of the Internet

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!