Digital Divides 0

Right here in River City.

Well, just down the road a piece:

But residents of Land of Promise Road, a rural enclave less than a mile from Fentress Naval Auxiliary Landing Field, say they are being left behind in an era of near-instant communication.

Unable to get high-speed Internet or cable TV or reliable phone service, about a dozen residents have banded together to press local communications companies and the city government to come to their aid.

Cox Cable and Verizon say it’s outside their service areas.

More properly, it’s inside their service areas, completely surrounded by folks with access to home broadband, an island of dialup in a sea of speed.

It’s been almost a decade since I used dial-up. I have no idea how long it would take to have one of today’s heavy, graphics intensive, script-laden web pages full of embedded video to load over a 28.8 modem. Days, I imagine. Long enough that, when residents of Land of Fortune Road need to use the internet to do such things as, say, fill out college applications or check their course assignments, it’s easier for them to drive to Starbucks than wait for the download.

At the rate my cable and phone bills go up annually with no improvement of service (which is, I must say to be fair, pretty reliable), one would think a bit of them could be used to lay some cable for Land of Fortune’s unfortunates.