Having decided to move back to Rensselaer County from the outskirts of Hudson in Columbia County, I made the error of not making sure usable internet would be available where I was moving to. Many probably would have quickly foreseen this about-to-be-blunder. But after living in Europe for a decade where you didn’t even think about the internet because it worked so well, then moving to Troy where it was semi-decent–with the exception of Verizon diligently working to discover new fees they could someday add to the everyone’s bill—and then to Hudson where the cable internet was extremely fast, it didn’t cross my mind that an introduction to the realities of rural New York internet would be just ahead.
And why would I think about it? Of course I knew that much of New York State had been left in the 1990’s as far as internet speeds—or non-speeds—were concerned. But since 2015 we have been hearing how Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Broadband For All initiative was going to fix that. It wasn’t cheap—over $500 million was being spent on top of all the money various governments have already basically given to internet providers throughout the US to fix something that shouldn’t still be broken but still was and is. This time was going to be different. And it’s going to completed by the end of 2018. Or else the Governor, who is surely on a short-list of possible candidates for the 2020 Presidential election, isn’t going to be happy.
While it’s not yet the end of 2018, it’s getting closer by the day. And with Cuomo promising that 99.9% of New Yorkers will have internet speeds of 100 Megabit per second or greater by the end of the year, one would think that at least those living within commuting distance of the Governor’s office would have been hooked-up by now. One would be wrong.
Spectrum was offering a pretty good deal of $44.99 a month for the first year for up to 60 Mbps after I typed in my address (the outer fringes of Stephentown on the Nassau border) into their webpage. It wasn’t 100 Mbps like the Governor said I might be getting, but anything over 20 Mbps seems fast enough. So I filled in the web form, gave Spectrum my personal information, and was told a technician would be there sometime between 8am and noon at the end of the week. I rearranged my schedule to be sure I was available for this five hour window and went on to other moving details, assured that this problem, at least, was solved. It wasn’t.
The day before my Spectrum hookup I received an email saying that they don’t provide cable at my address. Order canceled. I wasn’t really all that surprised. Everyone in America pretty much expects to be let down by their cable company at some point, so at least they were getting that part done from the get-go. “Ha!” said my Soviet-born wife. “Just like Russia. Big promise, big letdown.” My wife is enamored with America, how comfortable it is and how most things more-or-less work, so when something Soviet-like comes along here, she loves to pounce on it.
America, I explain to her, is a land of choices. When something doesn’t work, we merely go on to something that does. I find that classic 80’s Wendy’s commercial which mocked her country, the one where a model with all the sensuous curves of a Joseph Stalin Tank walks the catwalk dressed in a grain sack as day wear, evening wear, and swim wear, all judged to be “verry nice!” by another Stalin Tank. “Having no choices is no fun,” said the announcer. “Verry nice!” says my wife.
My next choice–because choices are fun–was Consolidated Communications, which was FairPoint before that, and Taconic Telephone back when the operator was someone you went to High School with and would recognize your voice when you called for information and then ask for their yearbook back. Consolidated’s site says I can get “up to 10 Mbps”—still not quite what the Governor is looking for– but at only $25 for the first year. So I call Consolidated and give them my address. I can’t have 10Mbps, says the Consolidated woman, because my address is too far from a junction or something. They can, however, give me “up to 4 Mbps”. Oh well, I can live with 4 Mbps until then end of 2018, when, I have been assured by our leader, I will have around 100 Mbps. Anyway, it should be cheap, probably around half the price, I assume, since they are giving me less than half the speed.
Never assume that the phone company lives in the same world as the rest of us humans. Up to 4 Mbps is in fact $60 a month, and I will have to sign a contract for a year pledging my loyalty to Consolidated. If I move I will have to pay $100 to get out of the contract if my new address is one of those places on the planet that Consolidated doesn’t service with such great deals and AOL-like speeds. I’m pretty sure it used to be the other way, that you could get out of contracts if you moved out of a service area. But Consolidated seems to have found that stockholders like the profits this new type of misery brings in, so they go with it. I do learn though that I can pay an extra $3 a month for no contract and the luxury of being able to escape Consolidated if I move, or instead, go over to semaphore towers or smoke signals as my preferred form of high-speed communication. I take the $63 plan. “Verry nice!” says my wife.
A Consolidate technician comes out a few days later and hooks me up to their DSL. He fires up his laptop to run a speed test so I can see just how blazing fast DSL is now in 2018. The speed test web page stops loading half way through and then hangs there for a while, long enough even for me to remember dialing in to a Bulletin Board System called Fly by Night in the late 1980’s and connecting faster. “Well, that’s not encouraging,” said the technician. Eventually it loads, and after a few tries we manage to hit 3.5 Mbps, which for “up to 4 Mbps” isn’t all that bad. Theoretically ‘up to” includes nothing, so anything is better than nothing. As soon as his truck turns out of the driveway, the speed starts working its back toward nothing. Eventually it averages daily to around 2.3 Mbps, but sometimes can hit as low as 0.7 Mbps. “Verry nice!” says my wife. She points out that when they first turned the internet on in Russia, her the speeds were twice as fast, and this in a village where poultry are still used as space heaters.
I can’t accept that here in the Empire State we can’t achieve internet speeds that will even come close to those of in a crumbling Soviet-built factory town named after asbestos. I contact Consolidated’s Board of Directors to see what they can do. Consolidated VP Rob Koester writes me back and promises to “see if there are any creative options for you and the speeds we offer today.” I write him back saying I find it wrong charging people over double to sign up for a speed that is less than 40% of what they wanted and were told to call about online. He writes back saying “I agree with you completely”. Then I never hear from him again. So much for corporate creativity. “Verry nice!” says my wife. She declares all this internet nonsense gives her warm memories of the cold Motherland “where nothing works. Even the things that work don’t work.”
But this is America and things work. Even the things that don’t work work. It’s merely a matter of finding the correct thing. My cell phone internet works with 4G LTE, except my AT&T phone doesn’t work all that well at my new address. I see, however, that Sprint’s coverage map shows my address as having “excellent” 4G LTE reception, which should have speeds of close to 30 Mbps. It’s expensive and data is capped, but this has now become a matter of national pride. I sign up for a data-only plan and a Sprint Hotspot arrives in my mailbox a few days later. When I turn it on, I find that my ”excellent” reception isn’t all that excellent. Actually, there is no reception. If I stand on the roof with the device held over my head and avoid lightning bolts, I can sometimes get speeds of between 1.8 Mbps and whatever the term would be for negative speeds, perhaps entropy.
“Get an antenna,” says the guy at the Sprint store. I get an antenna and my speed drops to even less then entropy. “Get our antenna,” says the guy at the Sprint Store when I return. Sprint makes an antenna-like device called a Magic Box, which finds the closest tower and then pulls that signal in, amplifies it, and pushes it back out so you magically have great Sprint data speeds. Or something like that. The guy at the Sprint store was sort of vague as to how it works. He says it’s magic. Sprint doesn’t give everyone who wants a Magic Box a Magic Box. Only some addresses qualify. Mine does and the guy at the Sprint Store tells me to call Sprint and ask them for one. “They will probably give you one, unless they don’t,” he says. They don’t. Since I bought my Sprint service from a reseller and not from the guy at the Sprint store I can’t have one. “Verry nice!” says my wife.
For many Eastwick readers, absolutely none of this news. It’s the way things have been and the way things still are, no matter what the government says is coming. You probably should have just skipped this article and gone on to see what George Holcomb is up to. Of course the internet will get better. But for the moment, out here in the hinterlands of New York, things are still the same as it ever was for the very people that Governor Cuomo needs to impress the most if he doesn’t want to be remembered as that guy from Queens who lost his State job to Miranda from Sex and the City. You could watch the whole series right now on YouTube to see what that might be like, but you would have to move to Russia first. “Verry nice!” says my wife.