Moving out to the country from the city was an eye opening experience in many ways not just from the Internet point of view. The wind blows out here constantly. There is no such thing as delivered pizza. A run to store takes 2 to 3 hours. People like plumbers, electricians and others for your home takes a lot of work to find them and to get them to show up. Oops, too much digression.
In the city we had originally we had dialup at 56K, if we were lucky and the stars aligned. Next we moved up to an ISDN at 128K which we thought was amazing speed. A cable modem at 1 Mbps was unbelievable even though it was a shared medium. The last upgrade was a DSL modem at 3 Mbps was so fast we did not know we could use that much bandwidth.
Country living, we can see the DIA tower, had our phone company offering us dialup when we transferred our phone. Oh come on, my last PC that had a modem in was 8 or 10 years ago. We searched a found another alternative that used satellite service was very expensive and not much faster than 128K.
Eventually, we found a line of sight dish service using Motorola technology. The speed is not consistent but we get about 1.5 Mbps. If it snows, you better clear you dish off. If you have a tree growing in the line of sight you better get it trimmed. You have to unplug you dish receiver every month or so, because the errors accumulate and service slows down. The electrical plug is the weird purge mechanism.
Just this week our phone company called us and said the have laid fiber about two miles away. We got excited and signed up for 3 Mbps DSL service. They said the may even have 7 Mbps service within a year. So there is a speed angel looking out for us.
BTW: The title is taken from Top Gun starring Tom Cruise in 1986.
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