Dial-Up Blues
02:51 PM Feb 10, 2010
If you want high-speed internet access, and you happen to live in certain areas on and around Eastern Kentucky's Pine Mountain--currently there's only one thing to do: Move.
Living in a house that hangs onto the edge of Letcher County, whenever Samantha Sparkman, 21, pops open her Compaq laptop to try to surf the Internet, she has to deal with a plodding and unreliable dial-up connection."It took me three days to download 15 songs" she says of the time she purchased music from iTunes.
Studying to become a Physical Therapy Assistant, Sparkman's Internet frustrations aren't just about not being able to snag her favorite tunes. She needs to download online tests and lectures for her classes, classes that'll be hard to complete if she doesn't find a speedier way to link to the Internet.
Over in Harlan County-- in another area that borders Pine Mountain-- that's sort of what happened to James Boggs. Though he stopped taking online college courses for a variety of reasons, one of them was definitely his appallingly slow dial-up connection: "Beyond a doubt it's impossible to do the work," says Boggs. The 26-year-old recalls how once, it took him nearly an hour to download an article that consisted of a single page.
Boggs eventually ditched the dial-up. With a wife and a growing family-- paying for it, plus an extra phone line, didn't seem to make sense. Besides, feet away from his house, roadside sign's advertised cheap broadband rates via a telecommunications company called Windstream. ( Take the Dial-Up Rocks Pledge)
The country's leading rural wire-line carrier, Windstream Communications provides broadband access to rural communities. The company advertises heavily in Boggs's area. Boggs frequently gets direct mail ads from Windstream boasting of "6 Mbps High-speed Internet".
With a 30-day satisfaction guarantee and no sign up fee or contract required, the company is offering a good deal. Boggs, for one, is sold. But there's a problem, despite the sign outside his house, each time he rings Windstream to ask for the service, he's informed broadband access isn't available in his vicinity.
The same is true for Sparkman, who says she's called the company about a dozen times trying to order broadband. Once, she says, a customer rep actually scheduled an appointment for a Windstream technician to come to her house and outfit it with a connection. Sparkman waited around all day, but the worker never showed. She hasn't given up.
Sparkman recently attended a 50-strong meeting of a group called Pine Mountain Residents for Broadband. So did Boggs. At the meeting made up of residents fed up with not being able to get better web access, there was talk of Windstream not being interested in expanding its broadband coverage to Pine Mountain because the company wouldn't be able to turn a large enough profit. "They don't feel like they need to bring the Internet to us because there aren't enough houses," theorizes Sparkman.
Sparkman may be dead-on: Contacted via email, Windstream spokesperson David Avery doesn't know what's specifically involved with the situation at Pine Mountain, but says Windstream, "has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy broadband service to roughly 89 percent of our voice customers. We constantly explore ways to make broadband available to the remaining areas of our network, but the costs are often prohibitive to earn back the investment at affordable rates for customers." ( Take the Dial-Up Rocks Pledge)
In other words, what Sparkman said.
Pine Mountain Residents for Broadband is determined to bring a decent internet connection to its neck of Kentucky. To this end, the group has hooked up with some other community organizations through the Web site Dialuprocks.org. There, they've been uploading protest videos. " I would like to have high speed Internet because I have two small grandchildren--six and ten years-old--that I feel are being left behind because they don't have high speed Internet..." remarks one poster.
"Broadband today should be defined as a universal service, just like phones were in the 1980s." says the dialuprocks.org website. "Like telephones, broadband is a public resource and not simply a private enterprise." (Take the Dial-Up Rocks Pledge)
Dial-Up-Blues
KentuckyWoman — 07:21 PM Feb 10, 2010
Sparkman and Boggs are experts on the problems with dial-up internet and really understand the importance of universal broadband internet access. Great Job!you'll make me pay for it?
lex_citizen — 12:35 PM Feb 17, 2010
so you'll hit up congress for a subsidy - that makes my taxes go up.why are you making me responsible for your access?
satellite service works.
Why not!
Bledsoe_Citizen — 03:42 PM Mar 03, 2010
Why not get subsidy for it when the gov. gives money to everyone else! And besides, I pay taxes too. There are a lot of people that pay taxes that live here and we all deserve the privileges of high speed internet. Well, I guess we need to take our coal severance money back and use it for our dsl.Mymnabsense games
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