Italian poet Dante Alighieri sublimely conceived a devilishly clever imagining of hell more than 700 years ago.
But I’ve been living Dante’s hellish vision right here in good old 21st century Vermont.
Digitally, that is.
In the verdant hills of Calais where I live in north central Vermont, I have been inexorably heading down into digital damnation for some two decades. Through no sin of my own (as far as I know) I have been consigned to dial-up, a lack of broadband whose implications have gone from minor inconvenience to major annoyance to virtual banishment as time (and bandwidth) have grown.
No burning soles on my feet, true. Just the crashing of browsers. The spinning disc of delay. The Facebook albums I’ll never see and the YouTube links I will never watch. The ancient programs I must run because I can’t do software updates. The constant timeouts. The trips to town to load stuff onto a flash drive on someone else’s computer. And oh lord, all those hours waiting for sites to load, wasted away….
I don’t have the Roman Poet Virgil as my guide as Dante did — if I had had a choice, I would pick John Stewart today. But I do have many Vermonters as company as I have undertaken this depressing descent into the digital divide, suffering 26K torture as bad as Dante’s flaming rivers, frozen slush, wallows of excrement and blazing pitch for lying politicians (yes, some things never change).
For those who weren’t English majors or classics scholars, Dante’s epic poem “The Divine Comedy” describes his vision of hell through nine tiered descending circles of increasingly dire punishments, as well as his vision of purgatory and heaven. Now, I’ll admit, his allegory isn’t exactly a metaphoric match, since my earthly punishment is not self-inflicted and I am still alive, but I can’t think of a better way to describe my slow death in dial-up land.
For longer than I can remember I have been joking about living in digital hell just eight miles from the state capital, without cable or DSL broadband, and also no cell phone service. An estimated 20 percent of Vermonters suffer the same fate, according to Karen Marshall, who heads ConnectVt, the state office working to meet a 2013 deadline to get everyone in Vermont access to Internet broadband.
At a rough guess, that’s at least 100,000 unlucky souls.
My hell joke has slowly lost its humor. Working at home without broadband today is like trying to ride a bike with flat tires: You go nowhere fast. When I tell friends from downcountry I’m on dial-up they look at me with amazement or offer the kind of heartfelt expressions of sympathy someone gets when their pet dies.
It’s the most prosaic transactions — buying a shoe, paying a bill or checking your mutual fund – that are the worst, because they require a secure encrypted server, which magnifies the data transferred and hugely slows the process to an exercise in frustration and futility.
If you’re in digital hell, you’re consigned to use the library or visit friends whose house is wired to do all but the most mundane surfing. Folks will go to Herculean efforts to escape, like my enterprising neighbor. He left state employment to start his own business a few years ago and needed broadband.
Fortunately, he knew how to climb big trees: He put on tree climbing gear (he’s got a forestry background) and shinnied 50 feet up to the wobbly top of one of my pine trees to attach a wireless antenna, then draped 200 feet of cable from the tree and ran it through a window into his house to a router.
That I and many others live bereft of broadband is due to geographic happenstance, rural disadvantage and corporate calculation (as in, you end-of-the-line folks are not worth our money and effort). Both cable and phone DSL broadband hitch a ride on electrical utility poles to get to rural homes. My electrical connection via Washington Electric Cooperative runs through 3/4 miles of former farm fields, now deep forest, with not many houses on the spur. Cable giant Comcast runs cable nearby but decided there aren’t enough homes on our road to make it worth their while (I asked once: they wanted $12,000 and 20 homes to sign up for 2 years to bring cable in. There’s a circle of hell right there).
As for phone line DSL connection, the nearest switching stations Verizon, now FairPoint, had were beyond the three-mile limit DSL needs to work on copper lines. As for my neighbor’s desperate wireless solution, for me the signal was sketchy and there was a $500 upfront cost for the gear.
Satellite? A neighbor had it but like many dish users had little good to say except the service was spotty and costly (snow affects the signal — not a good attribute in Vermont.)
So my morning routine looks something like this: Click for dial-up internet connect, wait a minute or two to get access, click for the Boston Globe sports section, NESN and Google news, go away and make coffee. Come back, see if anything opened, click a few stories, go off and have breakfast. Come back and see what stories opened up. Or start over again, since I frequently get a “server time-out” message. Or worse, my browser has crashed and I’m back at the beginning. Or it tells me I need to upgrade my Flash (which I can’t do on dial-up). Very helpful. Another circle of hell achieved.
And don’t even get me started on the three megabyte e-mail photo attachments that friends innocently send or how after nearly 12 hours online trying to send my IRS return via TurboTax on April 16 and 17, the TurboTax help desk informed me that the data file is now too big to send via dial-up. (Memo to TurboTax: Don’t you think that should have been spelled out somewhere?).
On that panicked day, which involved both the IRS and taxes, I was pretty sure I had landed at the bottom of digital hell, my computer frozen like Dante’s 3-headed devil himself in an icy miasma.
And then, suddenly this spring, came a whiff of redemption. After years as a lost digital soul, I heard a rumor FairPoint was working to install DSL broadband in my ‘hood. I began seeing FairPoint crews working along the County Road, a main artery north of Montpelier, in rain, snow flurries and blackfly season, even on Saturdays and Sundays.
It turns out, having survived Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the service problems that dogged its 2008 buyout of Verizon landlines, FairPoint has been quietly busting its broadband butt, spending $66 million stringing 1,000 miles of costly so-called “backbone fiber” and installing 300 “switches” to expand state-of-the-art DSL access to meet state deadlines. Lo and behold, my road is among those that will get DSL broadband by July 1.
Hallelujah, I say.
So I’m now planning a broadband party. Maybe we’ll watch stupid YouTube videos, a pirated old episode of the X-Files, download a podcast or see Lady Gaga’s latest video. Maybe we’ll all just sit outside browsing with laptops, drinking mojitos and not talking except to share links. I can’t wait.
Will I be in digital heaven at last? Considering what’s on the Web (viruses, scams, phishing, dumb YouTube videos) I’m not counting on it. But it sure will beat where I’ve been for the last decade.
