Some 18 years ago, I moved from the Silicon Valley suburbs to the wilds of the California coast, and have questioned that move for not a single moment. The area is gorgeous, the natives friendly, and then there’s the beach that inspired me to take up the camera and spend time learning its workings.
If there was ever an insect in the ointment it would be the lack of broadband options. As in dearth. As in “Well, you’re the one who chose to live in a rural setting.”
At the time it proved rich fodder for a series of Macworld articles umbrellaed under “Broadband in the Boonies.” In the good old days, we country bumpkins had little more than dial-up and satellite connections to feed-in the outside world. And, considering that streaming media wasn’t yet really a thing, it was annoying, but hardly intolerable. And surely, with time, conditions would improve with cable, fiber, line-of-sight… anything.
And it did to the extent that a little over a decade ago, DSL was introduced to our pleasant coastal valley. Okay, it topped out at 5 megabits per second down and 640 kilobits up, but because I used a third-party provider rather than AT&T, I didn’t have to deal with a data cap. And when the connection crapped out, I could talk to a human rather than be buried in a phone tree.
And that’s the way it’s been ever since. Until now.
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