Views from the Slow Lane

I live in a backwater - Santa Fe, New Mexico - and most times I like living in a backwater. Not much traffic, low property taxes, no factories, no airport with its toxic fumes.

In 2000, we got DSL in Santa Fe, but only for the downtown area. Luckily our house is close enough to the main juntion box or whatever - so we have had DSL since then. Not fast DSL, but DSL. Now, in 2007, most people in Santa Fe can get broadband through DSL or the cable company. Since 2000, we have been on Earthlink DSL. This month, after too many frustrating calls with Earthlink (always a two hour call with someone in India where they make us take apart our whole network before they will believe that we are not getting a connection), we switched to Qwest DSL. When I talked to Qwest they told us we would get 7 Mbps (megabits per second) speed at our house - more than twice what Earthlink told us we could get and more than three times what we actually got. This, of course, was "bait and switch". After we signed up they told us our neighborhood only gets 3 Mbps. Okay. Still faster than we we actually got with Earthlink (1.5 Mbps).

We switched, but our connection kept going off and on, like it had with Earthlink, but Qwest at least sends guys out to the house. We connect to the Internet by old wires, strung from an old house, through a big Russian Olive tree, across the yard, across the dirt road we live on, to a pole. The pole is 400 feet from the junction box, but the tech who was out here yesterday said our connection is going over 10,000 feet, jumping from pole to pole, out and back, all around the neighborhood, to get to the junction box. They are sending the "bucket truck" on Monday to fix this.