Little ISP On The Prairie

Doing Time In Leavenworth

The rest of the week I spent at my mother-in-law’s house there in Leavenworth. Her family homesteaded the area around Leavenworth (Kansas’ first city) where my brother-in-law runs a small cattle ranch (farm?). Anyway, since Granny didn’t have broadband (she’s not exactly technologically aware, to be kind), I had to prevail upon her to let me tie up her (one) phone line so that I could call the nearest Verizon ISP to check mail and try to get some work done. The good news is that I was able to easily connect to some site in St. Joseph, Mo., at 44kb—about 30 miles away. The bad news is that this ISP was so hammered it would not support more than about 25% of the available bandwidth, so effectively I was connected at 10kb. I think a tight string with two cans would have had better throughput. Yes, I tried to use my wireless card to reach one of the neighbors, but they must have read Dan Appleman’s book on safe computing; they were all locked down.

Everything Moves At A Slower Pace—Especially The Data

Given this primitive connection, everything I tried to do online took a lot longer. Since I had so much time to wait for each Web page, mail message, and file to get downloaded, I spent considerable time looking at what else was moving up the wire. Sure, Microsoft Outlook adapted itself by downloading just the mail headers. However, there were other culprits that made matters worse. One offender is the new Microsoft Live One Care beta that insists on downloading fresh virus signatures and updates in the background along with the other security updates. It was nice that I was not confronted with a modal dialog when these downloads were required, but the number and size of the updates were a bit onerous at this download speed. These patches, fixes, and whatnot ranged in size from a few hundred thousand bytes to several meg.

I also noticed that all of the Web sites I visited (except Google.com) were choked with picture-rich ads and animations. For example, the Southwest Airlines and Microsoft.com sites were clearly written for a broadband connection. I guess they figure that everyone is connected to broadband nowadays. Well folks, they’re not. Today’s content providers (including MSN, AOL, Yahoo!, and other “home page” sites) should have an option to trim down their content for those who can’t open a high-speed connection for whatever reason. Windows provides enough information to applications to sense the net speed, so these sites could trim down the flood of “nice but not necessary” stuff they feel compelled to put in our faces. Yes, that means the ads need to be tighter in some cases.

No Relief Or REA In Sight

One of my wife's cousins living in Lansing, Kan., works for AT&T. I asked him about the availability of broadband in the countryside out near my brother-in-law's farm. He said that due to the way that the politicians (state and federal) have structured the rules, if AT&T builds the infrastructure to support the rural areas (that include small schools, farms, homes, and businesses), other companies are permitted to lease the lines at a tiny fraction of the cost to install and maintain them. This keeps broadband from reaching his cousin's farm or the thousands of others too far away from existing equipment. He said AT&T will never install the needed infrastructure as long as those rules are in place. I expect we as a country might need to set up another REA (Rural Electric Authority) like the one established in the ’30s to electrify rural communities too far out to be economically viable for the big power companies.

My visit to Kansas was very enlightening. As usual, the people were nice and friendly (it helps to speak “Kansan”), but I also found that they’re a bit behind the times here and there—they still let people smoke in restaurants and other public places. Perhaps they have to smoke to soothe the frustration they have as they try to catch up with science and technology.