While waiting for my food at Amante’s the other day, I perused a week-old issue of the Independent Weekly and read the interesting cover story about the lack of high-speed Internet access in Chatham County, NC. Apparently the cable and phone companies don’t think there would be enough demand for it in this rural county to justify the cost of building the infrastructure for high-speed Internet, so people there are still stuck on dial-up.

I haven’t been on dial-up for 10 years, and I’ve quite forgotten how slow a connection is on your modem. The Indy story provides a reminder:

A PDF can take 45 minutes to download. And those virus protection updates a PC routinely needs? The couple drives to Pittsboro to buy them on disk, because the connection times out before the updates finish downloading.

Dial-up can’t go any faster than 56 Kbps, and Upshaw says his fastest speed is 48 Kbps. “Some days, it’s a slow as 2 Kbps,” Upshaw says. “When it’s that slow, you just turn off the computer.”

I feel sorry for the people in that situation. And according to the story, people out there are paying $79 for satellite Internet connection and $65 a month for cellular service. That makes the $50 bucks I’m paying for RoadRunner look like a pretty sweet deal.