Technology in rural America
We live in the country. It is an hour-and-a-half drive to the nearest mall. The street we live in is not paved and, at night, it looks an awful lot like the moon. There are deer browsing a few hundred yards from the house. You can look up at the sky at night and see the Milky Way. It’s scenic and pastoral. However, living apart from “civilization” has its drawbacks.
Now, we don’t live like we’re in the 19th century here. There are five computers in our house for three people. We have satellite TV, TiVo, high-speed Internet, and cell phones. Let me qualify that last statement. We have these things. They don’t always work the way they’re supposed to, but we have them. At least I get a bill for them every month.
Let me also qualify, that I’m not technically backward. Although I am over 50, I worked many years in gathering technical intelligence for our nation. I have worked many years in the information technology field. I make my living taking care of the servers, workstations, and networks for a system of health centers. I’ve worked with every Windows operating system ever released as well as several Unix/Linux variants. I am familar the alphabet soup of LANs/WANs/ISDN/T1/OC3/VPN/TCP/IP and whatever else you can string together. In my spare time over the past decade and a half, I have used computers to record my music compositions, post them on the Internet, to make and market CDs, to publish books, as well as operating a couple of blogs and an active social network. Technology isn’t a stranger to me.
Nevertheless, living out in the country like we do, the stuff just doesn’t work as designed. That’s frustrating. Two separate nights this week, we were trying to watch a television show and the satellite signal kept breaking up. Of course, though satellites are not affected by terrestrial weather, the microwave signals they transmit do get scattered by heavy rains, etc. However, it wasn’t raining at our house. It was the “local” channels (meaning signals being uplinked from the local NBC, CBS, and ABC affiliates) that were getting jammed by weather. All the other programming, like Fox News, ESPN, and other stations were just fine. Why is it I pay for satellite TV just so I can get the same shows that are downlinked to the local affiliate stations retransmitted to me second-hand? After all, the local affiliates get their programming by satellite! The downlink signal from the satellite covers most of the United States. The only reason for this that I can think of is that it allows me the “privilege” of watching local TV commercials.
When we first moved in six years ago, the satellite installer was pulling in all the channels on the unconfigured satellite decoder. There were all the local channels we enjoyed when we lived in our prior home. He asked me, “What’s your zip code here?” I answered him and he entered the digits into an on-screen field. Suddenly, all the local channels were gone! When I asked what happened to them, he told me that subscribers in our county couldn’t get local channels. However, if we lived in the neighboring county, just a few miles away, we could get them. The signals are coming off the same satellite. Why couldn’t we have them? If he had put the zip code in for the neighboring county, I would be able to see the local channels! I eventually had to change satellite providers to get local channels. All I can figure is that the powers-that-be in our county didn’t want us to be able to watch the local weather, because that would give us forewarning that approaching thunder would soon interrupt our Internet connection. More on that later.
If I can get a TV signal, then it is often the case that I want to record a show to watch later. When I set the TiVo to record a show that comes on at 5 pm., I’ve learned to set it to start 5 minutes early. I have had far too many instances of watching a recorded 2-hour movie only to find that TiVo stopped recording five minutes before the end. That’s frustrating! So now, I set the timer to record five minutes before and five minutes after. Now, if I want to record an episode of “America’s Got Talent” on judo night, I occasionally come home to find that it has recorded an hour and ten minutes’ worth of Johnny Bravo or QVC programming instead. What the heck?
Regardless of which carrier you have, about 60 percent of the area we live in has no cell phone coverage. In my house, I have to sit by a particular window and hold the cell phone in my right hand to get a signal. Anywhere else in the house, there’s nothing. No “bars” to be had. If I switch hands, *poof* the call is dropped. As I drive to work in the morning down a winding country road, I see old black ladies standing out at the end of their driveways wearing their bathrobes and fuzzy slippers, their hair all lopsided because they just woke up, talking on their cell phones. The reason they’re standing outside in the bathrobes and slippers is because they can’t get a signal inside their houses.
The other day, I read an article where someone was protesting the NSA’s ability to collect geolocation data on American citizens using their cell phones. That problem doesn’t alarm me much, because I can’t get a cell phone signal 90 percent of the time. I might as well have a tin can without the string–the result is almost the same. Landlines aren’t much better. Every time it rains, the lines in the ground and various junction boxes along the way get filled with water and the lines go down. At work, some of the fax lines become so crackly that the transmission of faxes is disrupted by the noise. We call Verizon to complain and they wait two days to send some guy out when the weather is dry and the problem isn’t present. We have yet to get Verizon to respond when it’s actually raining.
This is because the Verizon person who answers the phone, after keeping on hold for nearly 40 minutes, is in Washington, D.C. She informs me that we are in the Potomac district for service calls. I ask why that is the case, when we’re four hours away from he Potomac area. She responds that “Everything east of Delaware is in the Potomac district.” I reply that “Everything east of Delaware is in the Atlantic Ocean.” She really doesn’t care. But I digress–
I understand why satellite TV is disrupted by rain, high winds, etc. What I can’t understand is why Verizon high-speed Internet is affected by thunder. Yes, thunder! When a storm is approaching our area, and the first rumbles of thunder are heard, our high-speed Internet goes offline. I’m serious. Rain and even lightning don’t seem to have an effect, but when it thunders, there goes the link. I have speculated that the link to whatever DHCP and DNS servers that Verizon uses are across the Chesapeake Bay from us, and perhaps rely on a microwave link instead of a fiber optic line or something. Perhaps, when I’m hearing thunder, there is unseen lightning in the clouds that are approaching over the Chesapeake Bay and the electromagnetic interference from the unseen lightning causes a lost link. I just don’t know. All I do know is that when it thunders, the 404 errors start to appear and no one in the house can surf anymore–because of a sound!
Even mature technologies like radio have their problems here. I live in radio hell. The nearest large markets for radio are at least 60 miles away. We live on the fringe of so many stations, it’s impossible to tune one in very well for very long. My favorite station is a talk radio station in Salisbury, Maryland–about a 60 mile distance. When I’m listening to it, if I drive more than a few miles south of my home on my way to work, another station on the same frequency begins to override it. This station is a gospel music station. As I drive south, Rush Limbaugh trades places with a fiery Evangelical preacher–about every five seconds or so. Almost no AM stations come it at all during the day. At night, its easier to get a station from Boston or Chicago than anything nearby. I even pick up fuzzy French stations from Quebec!
There are three local stations. One of them is about 65 miles away, so more than a mile from my house, that one drops out-of-range. Another one is a Mexican station and I don’t understand any Spanish. The last one is the venerable old station that has played the same records (yes, records) since the 1960s. The station is the only one that comes in reliably enough to set your clock-radio to. Unfortunately, they have a bad habit of flicking the wrong switch and transmitting dead air for up to ten minutes at a time. They also have a popular local talk program called “Swap Shop” which is on opposite the fuzzy, distant, spotty Rush Limbaugh. “Swap Shop” features a local guy with an Eastern Shore variant of a southern accent who takes calls from people who have things to sell. Here’s a typical call between the host and a female caller, rendered phonetically:
Caller: Hey, __________. I gotta used Jah-un Dee-er lah-wun tractah fuh say-ul.
Host: Whu-at? You gotta whu-at fuh say-ul?
Caller: A tractah. A rah-dun lah-wun tractah fuh say-ul.
Host: Whu-at ki-und?
Caller: A Jah-un Dee-er.
Host: A Jah-un Dee-er?
Caller: Yeah-up. A Jah-un Dee-er. I wo-ant fi-hunnert fuh it.
Host: How much you wo-ant fuh it?
Caller: Fi-hunnert!
Host: Fi-hunnert.
Caller: Yep.
Host: Duz it run goo-ud?
Caller: Whu-at?
Host: Duz it run goo-ud?
Caller: Duz it run goo-ud? I’ll tell you whu-at!
Host: Aw-raht! Whu-atz yo-ah numbah?
Caller: My whu-at?
Host: Yo-ah telly-phone numbah?
Caller: Oh, yea-uh. It’s seh-ven-oh-nah-yun, ay-ut-three-foh-ah (click, followed by silence because the lady switched her phone to the left hand while standing out in the driveway in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, trying to get a signal on her cell phone).
So that kind of programming on goes on every day from twelve to three p.m. Aside from that one station, there’s only one other station that comes in everywhere. It’s the PBS station from the University of Maryland. As far as I can tell, they play jazz bass solos 24 hours a day. I’m serious. If you randomly turn on the radio on that frequency at any hour of the day or night, the station is playing the upright bass solo from some straight-ahead jazz quartet in the 1950s. I’m a big jazz fan, but the bass solo of most classic jazz tunes is where the drummer quiets down so the upper register of the bass can be heard and the pianist plinks a few oblique triads here and there so the audience knows that something is supposed to be happening during this interlude. The station only has one deejay who hasn’t been outside of the station for six years. He talks like he has a mouthful of gym socks. He mumbles through his soliloquies between the bass solos and I can occasionally make out a familiar name, like Charlie Parker or Thelonius Monk. The rest is unintelligible. Not only does he not enunciate his words, but he is close enough to the microphone that his lips make a smacking sound when he talks.
So in this 21st century, while the rest of the world is enjoying the luxury of modern technology, we out here in rural America are still wondering when the benefits of it will reach us. Yes, we have cell phones, texting, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, TiVo, DirecTV, Dish Network, and everything else you have in your newfangled, big city. However, when you’re trying to reach us on the phone or on the Internet, you have to give us some extra time. We might be waiting for the Internet to come back after a distant rumble of thunder or we might still be trudging down to the end of the driveway with our ringing cell phone in hand before we can answer your call.
Greg West
