There are power outages in the city and our internet is down. I feel isolated from my friends and colleagues, not knowing what e-mail is waiting to be delivered, unsure about when that might occur. I can't check websites or blogs. Fortunately, cable TV and radio are available – and I had a daily newspaper delivered this morning – so I'm not totally out of touch with the world. But for someone like me who lives on the internet this is a major disruption to my day.
As a child I lived on a farm without electricity. Our phone was connected to a few neighbors via barbed wire fences (and when I get back onto the internet I'll include a link about folks in Texas who used the same technique to provide a rudimentary phone service in spite of having no electricity and no phone company).
The phones were powered by batteries. When we cranked the phone we would send a current via the fence wires to our neighbors' phones. Our ring was one long and two shorts, so when we heard that ring we knew someone was calling us. As long as we had batteries and the fence was not down we could talk to our neighbors.
I loved the phone and would spend a lot of time chatting to my friend who lived only a mile away. I wished that I could call other friends and relatives, but only city folks could do that.
Electricity arrived in that part of rural Saskatchewan in 1955. One can hardly imagine farms and farm homes without electricity but, indeed, that was the case prior to that year. Phone service arrived as well, but, until the 1970s, there were no private phone lines in that area, only 'party lines.'
Rural access to high speed internet has been slow to come. One can access the internet via satellite, but widespread, inexpensive access is needed to give rural people the opportunities that we city folk have. Wireless can work over large distances; we simply need the will to implement this technology.
The lights on my modem continue to blink showing me that the equipment is trying to do its job, but there is no signal. If this had happened back on the farm in the late 1940s my father and the neighbors would have gone out to look for a break in the barbed wire fence. Perhaps that's what our repair people are doing now.
Wait by the phone. Someone will fix the fence.
I'm back online! As promised, here is the discussion of barbed wire phones in Texas by Delbert Trew, just in case you thought I was making this up.
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