By Nelson Schneider - 08/16/15 at 06:32 PM CT
This week, Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica (one of my favorite tech blogs) published an article about the plight of the rural residents of the United States who find it difficult – if not impossible – to get modern telecommunications monopolies to throw them a bone and provide telephone and Internet service that is up to anyone’s standards. This article hit very close to home and I can completely relate to the subject’s situation… because the subject is indeed me.
I wrote to Ars this summer and – at the suggestion of MeltedJoystick’s erstwhile video/photo-grapher, Matt – submitted my plight as a news tip to see if Ars was interested in exposing Windstream for the villain it is. One phone interview and several e-mails later, my story has been added to the annals of the history of Terrible Internet in America.
Some readers may be surprised to learn that I am a farmer. However, farming and videogame critique go incredibly well together, as farming allows for an incredibly flexible schedule (outside of Planting and Harvesting times in the Spring and Autumn) and there is very little in the way of entertainment in the Midwest. Videogames fit naturally into the long stretches of time during which a farmer’s key activity is the equivalent of watching grass grow. Instead of passing the time by worrying about the weather, as did the four generations of my ancestors who farmed this land before me, I pass the time worrying about the gaming industry. After all, a scathing editorial or review won’t do jack to change the weather, but it might make a tiny impact on videogames.
On the other hand, with modern videogames, farming is a poor fit, thanks in large part to the overreliance on the Internet by modern games and the fact that telecommunications providers in the United States seem Hell-bent on ignoring everyone who lives outside of major metropolitan areas. There are three houses on my farm property (four if you want to count property that is out-of-state), and none of them can get wired Internet service faster than 3Mbps… and that fastest property is a rental house.
The house I actually live in finally gained access to DSL back in 2008. Prior to that, everything was pure dial-up, and the line quality at my location was (and still is) so bad that a 56K V90 modem would only connect at 28.8 speeds. For several years, I had setup a temporary office space in another house that had line of sight access to a terrestrial Wi-Max service called Future Technologies, which provided a whopping 1.5Mbps connection… that I had to hop in the car and drive to every time I wanted to do anything online.
But on that happy day in 2008 when Windstream finally installed enough new infrastructure to enable rudimentary DSL in my area, I switched. At home I was able to connect at 512Kbps while my temporary remote office was still able to get 1.5Mbps, only cheaper, less affected by the weather, and with absolutely zero bitching about overusing bandwidth (as Future Technologies was prone to do).
Sometime around the year 2012, I can’t remember for sure, Windstream claimed that I would be able to receive 1.5Mbps at home. I happily disconnected the DSL at the remote office and looked forward to finally being able to use my game consoles online and download Windows updates without taking my PC for a ride (not such a big deal for a laptop). Unfortunately for me, the DSL provided was incredibly unstable, frequently connecting at 200Kbps ranges instead of the promised 1.5Mbps. After months of calling them every day and arguing with the incompetent tech support located in South Carolina (or thereabouts), in November or December of 2012, Windstream finally “fixed” whatever the problem was and provided me with rock solid 1.5Mbps service at home for two years (I didn’t even have to reset my modem!).
I was still not overjoyed, however, as 1.5Mbps is laughably slow compared to consumer services provided to city dwellers living in Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska, whose TV advertisements constantly pounded home the message of just how poorly Windstream was serving me. I made sure to let Windstream know that I was eager to upgrade my service IMMEDIATELY whenever something better was available.
Earlier this year, in April 2015, Windstream began digging trenches in the ditches and in the middle of the road bordering my property. I thought – hope against all hope! – that they had finally decided to upgrade the infrastructure. No. They were just replacing an old splice in the line. And in the process, something went horribly wrong and my stable 1.5Mbps connection started behaving more like it had behaved in 2012 when it was driving me crazy and I was cussing out Windstream employees on a daily basis. After some profanity-laced calls to Windstream, I learned that 1.5Mbps service was being discontinued in my area and replaced with 1Mbps service.
What. The. Hell? Since when does telecommunications infrastructure get WORSE after two years instead of BETTER?
I’m no fool. I understand how telecos work, and I understand that Big Business doesn’t do anything that won’t bring in the maximum profit for the minimum effort. Hell, my farm runs under a similar mindset, and it does extremely well, thanks to modern techniques such as minimum till, dryland, and GMO seed. So I decided to open my wallet and throw money at Windstream to see if I could bribe pay them to improve my Internet infrastructure.
No.
No.
No.
“No,” seems to be Windstream’s favorite word. Fed up with getting nowhere with the company, I submitted a complaint to the FCC using the new FCC complaints website. Getting poked in the ass by the Federal Government finally encouraged Windstream to start talking. I was contacted almost immediately by Jody Harris, a Windstream representative, who initially told me that running a fiber business line to my farm would be expensive. I knew that already and asked for a quote.
A short time later Jody called me back with a quote of “around $20,000.”
“I’m still listening,” I said. Jody promised to refine the quote and come up with monthly pricing for something more impressive than the pathetic 3Mbps/3Mbps service Windstream was prepared to offer.
After calling back with an offer for 10Mbps/10Mbps service, which I said was still too slow, Windstream called me once again to let me know that the initial quote for running the new infrastructure was a bit on the low side. The new price was $383,500, and the company was even “nice” enough to price out monthly payments for the whole thing, which came to $10,000-something per month for a long, long time, but I had already stopped listening at that point.
$20 grand is expensive, but a reasonable business expense for a profitable family farm in Nebraska. $380+ grand is multiple years’ worth of net income from such a business! This new price was a complete deal breaker, and I encouraged Jody to try and figure out why the number had become so comically, stupidly big. I never heard back.
Meanwhile, MeltedJoystick’s CTO, Nick, had been taunting me with the fact that his parents’ farm, located only a few miles Northwest of mine – but conveniently outside of Windstream’s service monopoly – had been recently hooked up with fiber. Indeed, the small cooperative teleco that services the area – Northeast Nebraska Telephone Company (NNTC) – had taken out government loans to run fiber optic lines to ALL of their rural customers. In desperation, I contacted NNTC and asked them if they could encroach on Windstream’s turf.
Yes.
WHAT?!
Yes.
WHAAAAAAAAAT?!
I had forgotten what that word meant, as I had never heard it from a teleco. Ever. It turns out that, thanks to the Internet being a “new” technology, it doesn’t fall into the same category as normal telephone service. NNTC couldn’t offer me a phone line, but they could offer me fiber Internet. The cost? $42,000 for the cables.
NNTC executive, Terry Eriksen, who has been my contact through the entire process, told me that NNTC has been turning a profit with its fiber lines – on top of making all of their government loan payments. Eriksen also told me that 85% of all NNTC members pay for Internet service instead of just paying for landline phone, demonstrating that there is a significant demand among farmers and other rural residents for reasonably-priced, high-quality Internet service.
Sure, $42,000 is a lot of cash, by most people’s standards. It’s even twice the original Windstream quote. But it is 1/8 or less of the final Windstream quote, and NNTC actually seemed to WANT to do business with me, instead of blowing me off or ignoring me like Windstream always did.
One of the most common replies from moronic city people when I lament my rural Internet connectivity is, “LOL, just move!” They act as if nobody actually owns property and everyone is as free to flit from hovel to tenement as they are. They act as if sinking money into buying a new house is trivial. In essence, they act as people who have never owned anything and have no permanent attachments to any particular place. I can state for a fact that 99% of the time, buying a new house costs more than $42,000, and renting an apartment is just an infinite money pit that will never amount to anything. Paying NNTC to extend their fiber network into Windstream’s territory is a far more reasonable cost, as it is permanently improving the quality of my pre-existing home. Of course, even NNTC is an aberration among telecos, as Windstream and most others of their ilk would have rural residents believe outlandish stories about how our homes and farms are “too far away” to receive service, when it is pretty obvious that the diameter of New York City alone is a greater distance than that between many unserved rural residents and their nearest town. No, telecos, we are NOT “too far away,” YOU are too lazy and too cheap to serve us because we all don’t live on top of each other like monkeys in cages at the zoo!
I have signed the paperwork and sent the first payment to NNTC, and look forward to finally joining the 21st Century in late September/early October. At the same time, I will finally get the opportunity to tell Windstream to go EFF themselves forever (Nick won’t let me curse in the blog), as I will be switching my phone service entirely to cellular once I finally have an Internet line fast enough to handle VOIP. After years of suffering under their tyrannical monopoly, I will finally be free of Windstream (and they will be free of me, so the happiness flows both ways). I hope I never have to deal with that company again.
And also, Windstream delenda est.
