The Seattle Times has an excellent article about small, rural communities that have gone in one go from areas where people don't even have phones to fully-integrated broadband networks. Live in Nowhere, Washington, but get a job in New York City? No problem; just telecommute-- which illustrates that in the 21st century distance doesn't mean half as much as bandwidth.
For me, this isn't so much a happy tale of progress as a demonstration about how the road to the future is paved with maddening cracks. I'm reading about little timber towns in the Wenatchee National Forest who have blindingly-fast connections, yet I live just outside of Redmond, Washington, the centre of the Microsoft octopus, and I'm stuck with a 56k dial-up service that is only slightly faster than sending data packets by carrier pigeon.
No wonder I burn with a hard, gem-like flame.
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