Posted on May 8, 2009 - by rfrank

The cost of living in the country

I love where I live. I live out in the country about 7 miles from my church and 12 miles from the KidzMatter offices. There are four houses in “my mile” of the road. When we bought this property five years ago to build, I fell in love. The one thing I didn’t consider when I bought the land and built the house? How I would connect to the internet.

There are no good options. I checked into running a T1 line, but that was going to cost me about $600 a month. Ouch. I have begged and begged for AT&T to bring DSL our way. I even offered to pay for them to bring it down our road. They said “no thanks”. So for the past few years, we have had wireless “high speed” (in quotation marks intentionally) internet from a local internet provider. To call it high speed is a stretch. At it’s best, it functions at the speed of dial up. During busy times (evenings especially) it goes dead.

We finally decided that enough is enough. We’ve seen the HughesNet commercials on our Dish and I made the call. They came today to do the install and I’m happy to tell you that my internet is running pretty fast (that’s relative I know). But guess what, it looks like I am trying to contact the moon with the satellite! It’s huge! Just look at the picture! This means that now I have three ugly satellite dishes on my house (Dish TV, Hughes Net, and my other internet dish). Do I qualify as a geek?