Ball State

» LIVING WITHOUT A HIGH SPEED INTERNET CONNECTION

By China at 10:03 AM

My mother moved to a new house on a Lake a few years ago, and now she is very limited as to the services that are available. When she moved in, she wanted to get high speed internet service, however, she was told by each company that she called that it wasn't available in her area. Her internet connection, is quite frankly so slow it is beyond frustrating. Half the time when she tries to bring up a page, she has to give up because if there are a lot of graphics on the page, then it takes forever to load, and on several occasions she has had to call me and ask me to do stuff on the internet for her that she is unable to do with her current connection. Whenever I go there, I try not to have to get on the computer because it is really too slow to do anything with and since I am used to having a much faster internet connection, it frustrates me to no end when I use her computer.

Recently my mother received good news, high speed internet was now becoming available from one company in her area. She called them right away to sign up and they sent someone out to get her started. Well, she knew that her neighbors had gotten it, and was really excited that she was now going to be able to save time accessing information on the web. Well, all did not go smoothly, because even though her neighbors can get a connection, for some unknown reason my mother's house does not receive the signal. They can't really tell her why, however she can't get the high speed connection at her house. Now this is the really funny part, when my brother comes to visit and has his laptop and internet card with him, he is offered to connect to the neighbor's high speed internet connection. Not only that but sometimes when the neighbors get online my mother hears the dialing in the background of her own phone. Even to the point where if she is not on the phone, her answering machine will pick it up. When she contacts the company, they tell her that this is impossible. They say there is absolutely no way that things like that can happen. Well, honestly I wouldn't have thought so either, but I have seen it first hand and know that it really does.

Now here my mother sits without a high speed internet connection and the neighbors dialing through her phone. It is all really quite interesting.