On The Dull Edge: Being A Rural ‘Techie'
Involves a lot of waiting
Living in rural New York means some things are a given: your next door neighbor is most likely a quarter mile down the road, there are farms everywhere, and anything more advanced than a tractor is found in your local school or in the city.
I was, and still am, a nerd when it comes to tech. I lust after gadgets, I stare at keynote live-blogs, and my wallet fears the electronic section of any store I enter. But, living in a rural town meant that my hobby (read: obsession) couldn’t thrive like it could have elsewhere. The same way most advances take time to leave cities, technology took its sweet-ass time getting to where I was.
Internet access was, and continues to be, a big problem for rural areas across the county. Laying down wire is difficult and expensive and the inconsistancy of people meant Internet access was spotty.
I didn’t have broadband internet until I was 18. The services existed, the lines were (mostly) there, but it just didn’t make sense, at least to my parents, to buy into a faster connection. We had been using America Online for the past decade and my parents saw no reason to upgrade, especially when the options were between an expensive and slightly faster satellite connection and what they were used to. It just didn’t make sense, for them, to upgrade. And why would it? Their dial-up connection got them online to most websites and anything more substantial meant an easy trip to the library (which had a suitable speed for most things). My family wasn’t alone, there are plenty of people who, even now, continue to use dial-up in an age where smartphones have a internet connection upwards of 1000 times the speed of old 56k modems. LTE was a life-saver to those like me that craved internet that could load sites faster than crawl. It’s been a slow rollout.
Word of LTE reached me far sooner than actual connection did. As a child of dial-up, I salivated over the speeds in 2009 but wouldn’t see those speeds until around 2013, when the rollout was nearly finished across the country. When it did finally reach me, I was leaving the area for greener pastures.
By the time the coolest tech reach rural areas, what comes out are refined and tested products. It’s clearly a trade-off, with these areas getting the second-generation products and services that have been tested in areas that had access at launch.
With the advent of the high-speed internet to rural areas, it’s easier than ever for newer products and services to launch regardless of region. We live in exciting times, regardless of region.
On The Dull Edge is a semi-weekly opinion/memoir column that explores the life of the author, a tech-enthusiast who grew up in rural New York.
