Tag Archives: connectivity

Doing It for Ourselves…

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(This is a follow up to an earlier post, http://www.geekinthecountry.com/?p=1267)

When Jared Mauch, who lives in rural Michigan, was told that the national internet service provider (ISP) in his county wanted to charge him $50,000 to connect to their broadband system, he decided to go a different route and build his own ISP. He did. Apparently, it wasn’t that hard or expensive to do.

Then his neighbors wanted to get connected. Sure, no problem. He eventually pushed broadband to 70 households in the area. He charges $55 for 100Mbps and $79 for 1Gbps speeds. (Are you getting those speeds for those prices? I’m certainly not.)

Now, by winning a competitive bid, he’s receiving $71 million to expand his service to 600 households through a Covid recovery grant. His little private company is becoming a vital local service. The kicker is that he did all this in his spare time. He has a full-time day job as a network architect.

I remember reading the Consumer Reports assessment of ISPs a couple of years ago. It gave them, on average, a rating of “D” almost across the board. Not one company scored an “A” and only one was at a “B”. It was a municipal broadband company out of Tennessee. A local ISP beat all of the major companies in terms of uptime, connectivity, and customer service. Again, it’s not that difficult. We’ve had this technology for 40 years. It’s not even close to rocket science.

Here’s my question: why are we paying such high prices for substandard service from companies who will not invest in the infrastructure needed to reach our houses and farms and who have notoriously terrible customer service? Why is every major, national ISP consistently this terrible to us?

We deserve better. Rural America deserves better.

Frugal Innovations

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TTED2echnology – it’s not for just the rich anymore. Ravi Nadjou’s TED talk on Creative problem-solving has some really innovative and very low-cost tools that we, in rural America, can use right now to get our small farms and business in the red. The two that I found quite fascinating are gThrive and Be-Bound.

gThrive is a system of soil monitoring that uses basic technology to provide an amazing amount of real-time data, at a much lower cost, to farmers. It let’s you know the nutrient levels of your soil so that you can properly correct for them, instead of over fertilizing. In drought-stricken areas, understanding the moisture content of your soils could help you conserve water. Where I live, the fields are saturated with flood waters for most of the winter. Knowing when the soils are dry enough for proper germination is critical to ensuring that seed is not wasted on soggy soil.

Be-Bound frees your phone (phablet or cell-enabled tablet) from those cell dead zones. Essentially, it lets you use a number of applications, such as Twitter, from almost anywhere in the world, even when there is very little cell or Wi-Fi service. What this means for those who travel, is that you won’t necessarily have to use Verizon to get in touch with people in rural places. You may be able to go with a $35 plan and add Be-Bound. (That’s my plan, anyway.) Calls won’t work through it but texting, mail, and Twitter do. It’s currently only available for Android phones, but they are developing it for other platforms. It’s available at the Google Play store.