Internet at Last

“For Further Information Go to www.” or “I Can’t Believe You’re Still on Dial-up”.

For those who are computer savvy, I admit I have been on dial-up for the past 16 years! My home/office had no other connection available.  A neighbor subscribed to satellite and admitted it wasn’t much better than dial-up. Daily runs to the “It’s a Grind” coffee shop afforded me the luxury to read my email attachments and travel about the World Wide Web. 

My family and friends knew better than to send me attachments, but still others loaded my email with items I never did open.  But what was worse than all the attachments being sent were the times I needed to make contact with a company regarding my business, family, or personal matters. Always they referred me to their website.  “Website?” I screamed, “I can’t get to your website. It is torture to watch your thousand page website load. Please, someone just talk with me.”

Sometimes I felt like a second-class citizen because the assumption was that I was on dial-up as a choice! Often I would here something like….“You’re on dial-up? Fred, Arlene is still on dial-up.  Hey everybody, Dr. Kaiser is on dial-up. Can you believe it?”

People would then proceed to tell me the benefits of DSL, wifi, and how I could even put a telephone card into the slot of my computer and volahhhhh…instant connection. 

Well, I had the telephone card man visit my site. As he waved his long wand through the air to measure, I suppose, reception waves received from the visible tower on the hillside, he sheepishly stated, “You can’t be lower than a seven, and lady, you are a twenty-seven.” 

But a new day has arrived!  After many years of research, disappointments, and waiting, my neighbor, Mike, who is much smarter about these things than me, contracted with a company for our small neighborhood. Cindy, my assistant and computer genius did the “inside the premises stuff” and since last week I am connected with wifi.

I am told I have —

1. Symmetric service.
2. Low-latency
3. Bursting. Besides the guaranteed minimum speeds, the system provides additional speed that "bursts" beyond the guaranteed speed on demand.

Sounds impressive to me, even though I have little idea of what all of this means. I just know that connection to the Internet is faster than ever. I pay more money for it than for a telephone line, but I can open my laptop any place inside and outside the house and read my email. The connection to the Internet seems to be at Mach 5 speed compared to dial-up. This is a huge change for me. How will I ever adjust to this with all the expectations? Perhaps I should keep my dial-up telephone line active just in case I need to slow down. Yah think?