Oh, the guilt: How dare I complain about the quality of my Verizon FiOS service – not once, but twice – while each and every one of my fellow Massachusetts residents in 32 communities muddle through life without a broadband option to call their own.
These poor souls, despite living within the borders of a world-famous high-tech hotbed, wake up every morning consigned to world of … I don’t know how to say this … dialup. Our own computer-obsessed children have never once experienced the anguish that is dial-up. (OK, they’re only 5, but still.) To imagine the children of others …
The Boston Globe has the story this morning of what it calls these “dialup refugees:”
“We are creating a new kind of ghetto,” said Don Dubendorf, president of Berkshire Connect Inc., which works to bring high-speed Internet connections to Western Massachusetts businesses and institutions. “It’s morally wrong. It’s stupid economically, it’s dangerous from a public safety point of view, and it’s absurd from a public education point of view.”
He’s right, of course, and I don’t really mean to make light of the situation.
Verizon, Comcast, and others offer high-speed Internet in 90 percent of Massachusetts communities, but no providers offer broadband Internet access in 32 towns, and an additional 63 municipalities have limited service areas, according to a study by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative‘s John Adams Innovation Institute. (The study did not include satellite Internet.)
It’s one thing to fly over all those square states out in Middle America and know that broadband is but a pipe dream for many of your countrymen. It’s quite another to see such third-world conditions within a Sunday drive of MIT and Harvard.
