It was just like the old days on the trade show circuit except I finished the software a comfortable twelve hours before show time instead of on the plane coming out.
Mary and I got to the Stowe High School about 7am and set up our booth (really a table) in a great location that everyone had to pass right next to the Girl Scouts and their cookies and on the way to the polls. Mary used to like to get a booth location on the way to the restrooms because of the traffic although I did convince her that some people ought to be left alone until they were on their way out.
She taped her posters to the wall while I fastened my EVDO antenna to the window and set up my computer and the big monitor facing out. Polls were open so we had people coming by immediately. I was supposed to just be there for setup and then go on my way but there was too much traffic for that. Besides Mary never stays in the booth or behind the table; her position is always out in front buttonholing the prospects and this was no different.
“Hi, we’re helping the town committee which is working for better Internet access,” she said. “We’d like to ask you a couple of quick questions .”
“I don’t have anything but dialup,” some people said.
“Great,” she said. “You’re just the people we want to help. What’s your address?”
I’d key in the address if I wasn’t already working with someone else in which case she’d write it down for later inputting. The EVDO connection worked fine and, almost instantly, a new pin white pin (white was for dialup) would appear on the Google map of Stowe on my monitor. “Is that where you live?” I asked.
“Yes,” they’d say. “I hope you can help us get better access.”
“We already have broadband,” some other people said to Mary.
“Great,” she said. “If you tell us where you live, that’ll help us help other people get access.” Their pins would be red for DSL, blue for cable, green for wireless, and orange for cellular (like my EVDO).
Pretty soon the map was well enough filled out (see below) so that we were often able to say “Look at this; your neighbors on both sides seem to have DSL. Maybe you can get it to.”
Sometimes they’d say back “I’ve been calling Verizon every week and they keep telling me not yet even though they send me an ad for DSL with every bill.”
We asked the people who had recently gotten DSL (of which there were quite a few) how they’d managed to get it. Quite a few times the answer was “I was obnoxious” or “I started talking to a technician in a Verizon truck and he told me we could probably get it and helped me out.”
Some people said they had satellite access. We didn’t talk to anyone who liked it; they all wanted something better. They complained about stringent limits on the amount that can be downloaded, slow display of web sites, pathetically slow upload – especially for those with home-based businesses – and not working in rain or snow. But they said it was better than dialup and what else could they do.
Often people told us that they couldn’t find a tenant for an apartment or a buyer for a property because of lack of broadband availability.
If you look at the upper left hand corner of the map, you see no color; only white pins for dialup and black pins for satellite. That’s an affluent area called Robinson Springs; it’s a huge opportunity for some provider despite the fact that the large, expensive houses are spaced out. In the lower left, the string of white dots is Nebraska Valley; not even any satellite, perhaps because mountains obscure the southern sky. It’s a beautiful place to live with great hiking but you can see that cable (blue) didn’t go very far down the road and DSL didn’t make it at all. The telephone poles march down the street; clearly another line needs to hang from them.
You can see how cable and DSL peter out at the end of the roads away from the center of town. “Yeah, they got to my neighbor,” people said about cable; “but they want $10,000 to continue to us.”
Our hope is that the map above and maps like it that people in other towns might fill in will show providers where the opportunities are, help neighbors band together for better service, and help the State Telecommunications Authority (of which Mary is the chair) achieve their mission of 100% cellular and data coverage for Vermont by the end of 2010.
Twelve hours later we broke down our equipment, packed the car, and went home. I hadn’t eaten all day and Mary’d had just a few Girl Scout cookies. It was fun and the software didn’t even crash.