If you jumped with joy when wireless providers began announcing service extensions into the subways of New York and Washington D.C., you most likely share space in the category of modern human society that absolutely must at all times be connected. If you’ve ever experienced anxiety when that special time comes around before takeoff when the airline flight crew requests that you turn off your mobile device, or cursed Amtrak’s disastrously unstable wi-fi service, you’re among us. Being connected constantly is a brilliant and ultimately frustrating thing, because you’re no longer able to draw your own maps. Or, rather, you can but that map is overlayed with other maps of wi-fi networks and 3G towers. It you want to get really dramatic, it’s like a prison without walls. You’re welcome to leave at any time, but all of that information and information storage is staying right here inside.There are, of course, vast tracts of the United States that remain unconnected, limited to unreliable and expensive satellite internet service or dial-up and no 3G or 4G towers in range. This is the far side of the wireless divide, and it’s where, I, a fellow member of that connected generation, manage to live. The strip of county road up the driveway is one of 653,392 miles in the United States currently considered dead zones. And the FCC estimates that there are 1,738,828 other residents living in those dead zones, without that ability — increasingly taken for granted — to be connected anywhere at any time.
This lonely address can’t even get dial-up internet — the lines are too old — to say nothing of DSL or cable or, _ha_, FIOS. A satellite dish mounted to the side of the cabin connects us to the internet at fairly high rates of speed (depending on traffic), but with severely limited download/upload allowances. We get 350 MB of data a day. A single television show streamed over Netflix would max that out. And, with that kind of restriction, it would take me about a year to back up my hard-drive to the cloud. Fortunately, I’m able to do my backing up on sorties into town (covered by 3G) and, yes, our house has a few portable hard-drives floating around, however unreliable.
The rural connectivity problem is something well-recognized by the federal government. While on one hand, it means being able to stream TV and tap into cloud storage, that connectivity or lack thereof, means lost opportunities (jobs and otherwise) for citizens outside of it. So, the FCC is now handing out grants to rural wireless providers to bring some of those highway miles into the wireless world. This is great, albeit slow going. The first round of funding (Mobility Fund Phase I) was announced earlier this fall: 83,000 miles of highway at a cost of $299,998,632.
That’s a start. Our house isn’t included in that batch, but I’m not too worried about it. Though I also haven’t had a hard-drive fail in some time. Here’s hoping for Phase II or III and, in the meantime, here’s hoping the storm going on outside right now doesn’t knock out the satellite connection (it happens), leaving our address off the connected map altogether.