The Weight of Money

I have lived with high speed internet for at least 7 years. It started with DSL and my last residence had a T1 line. Needless to say, I have grown very accustom to high speed internet access. The partner has been living with high speed internet even longer than I have. We are both firmly committed to high speed access, or so we thought.

As soon as we signed the lease for our current residence, I ordered DSL and phone service. After a lot of calls and trouble tickets, the local dsl service finally decided that we cannot get high speed internet at our residence. All of the other dsl providers in the area echo this sentiment and we’re left with only cable modem options.

However, neither the partner nor I want to spend money with the local cable companies. Yes, we are quite aware of the fact that we don’t have to get cable in order to get internet, but that isn’t really the issue. Being a tv-free household, we just don’t want our money going to this company. Maybe some people think this is ridiculous, but it is just part of our way of voting with our dollars and we’re voting ourselves right out of internet.

Now, while we were waiting for the dsl that was not to be to get installed, we had to come up with some other internet options. The partner discovered that he could dial into a friends house and I remembered the free dial-up access I can get through campus. So, we’ve been making do with dialup and have discovered that it just might actually work for us.

We are looking at the option of paying nothing for a slower connection or paying $60+ to a place we don’t want to support. Now, while I thought that dial-up would be the end of the world, it turns out that is not the case. Dialup is actually working out just fine for the surfing that we are doing. The partner had high speed access at work, so he can get all of his streaming news articles. I am patient and will wait the couple of minutes for my pages full of tabs to load. Overall, it is far better than I thought it would be.

So now, I think we’ve decided that we would rather deal with slightly slower service for free instead of adding to our already elevated monthly expenses. Maybe it is something other internet-addicts (which I am also) could actually do for the right price. But I know, most people will read this and think “dial-up? no way!” and a couple months ago, I was right there too. But, having given it a go for several weeks now, it’s not too bad. In fact, I think we can make this work for the next year for an annual savings of about $800.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 5:14 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.