Wire-more-or-less?
I’m deep in the soup of competing high speed internet plans. There about seventeen different ways to do this, which is funny since there’s only one company to do it through: Comcast.
What ever happened to the free market? My options for HSI are simple; Comcast or Comcast. DSL isn’t available, so that leaves cable, and apparently it’s a monopolized segment. As we all know, monopolies are bad for consumers because they allow the monopolizer to charge as much as they want (except in some cases, when they allow the monopolizer to charge as little as they want).
They make it seem like you have choices by offering one thousand different plans that can be combined in myriad ways. And you can purchase your internet plan through hundreds of resellers, all of whom have promotions, deals and rebates meant to entice you to buy their particular brand of internet. But in the end it’s all the same, and when your promotional period is over and your mail-in-rebates mailed in, you’re going to be paying $57 dollars a month to Comcast.
Which is why I wish I lived in Chaska. It’s a suburb about an hour south of where I live, and to be honest, I don’t think I could even
find it on a map without the help of the internet. I think I got lost near Chaska once; I remember cows and really nice houses and people selling corn on the side of the road.
Anyway, in September the city of Chaska will start offering wireless internet access to anyone in the city limits for a monthly fee of $16. Now that’s the free market working for the benefit of consumers. It’s wildly cheaper that cable or DSL through the big service providers (Comcast, Qwest, Time-Warner) and it doesn’t require any hardware purchases on the part of the user. Me, I’m going to have to fork over a hundred bucks or more for a cable modem and a wireless router, and that’s just so I’ll be able to have wireless access in the 180 feet surrounding my house. If I lived in Chaska, I’d be paying a lot less for internet access anywhere; at the park, a coffee shop, the library.
If I lived in Chaska,
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
All day long I’d biddy biddy bum.
No, but seriously, what’s with Saint Paul lagging behind on all the important stuff? Smoking ban: we’re last to get it. Light rail: Minneapolis first. And city-wide wireless internet access for a reasonable price – something which is clearly feasible even for a city half our size? Not even on the radar in Saint Paul.
Instead I’m going to spend the next few days filling out rebate forms (for the high-speed service, for the cable modem, for the router, and for anything else I can find rebates for) in a vain attempt to bring down the cost of internet access. I’ll console myself with the reminder that I don’t have to drive two hours in rush-hour traffic to get home to a city last featured on the big screen in the Cohen brothers’ Fargo, as the birthplace of an innocent, dim-witted prostitute.
So there. Ya ha deedle deedle.