Sketchy Posting Today
by
See I live in a rural area that is criminally under served by broadband access on all levels. There is cable in the form of Time Warner, but not within several miles. Embarq is a local telco formed by sprint for the sole purpose of dumping debt that Sprint acquired by merging with Nextel, a really great business move which is also extremely scummy. Sprint is an extremely pathetic company when it comes to broadband, they don't really care about DSL and just jettisoned their CEO that was going to cover the entire country in a WiMax network.
0-25% they say is what my area is served by DSL from these jokers. Immediately to the West probably less than 15 miles away, Alltel is serving between 90-100% of their customers. The story is similar in every direction, every direction but here, where Sprint/Embarq is doing pretty much nothing but sitting on their ass playing the cellular wireless game.
So as such, all I have is satellite Internet which doesn't function in the rain, and despite a record setting drought in this state, we're actually getting some over due rain. Lots. Past 2.5 days I think we're looking at 4-5 inches, constant rain all day and all night. This is the first real break I've seen since about this time yesterday morning during which I rushed through news gathering and posting as fast as humanly possible and managed to get 7 out the door with the final 8th "quick links" stuck in dry dock.
I'll try the same again but there's every possibility that I'll get nothing more than this post out the door before it starts raining again. We're supposed to get another 1-2 inches during the day with another half inch tonight.
Smoke 'em if ya got 'em.
November 30, 2010 9:21 AM | Reply
In this particular case you should be careful with satellite internet. The data is sent to the whole coverage area, not just to your modem / computer. There are programs that are capturing such traffic, all that is needed is a dish of your own pointed at the satellite. Always use SSL encryption when loggin on to websites this way.