Update on internet

- Behold, the internet -

The latest and greatest in my search for a country connection is a little Netgear hotspot gadget. It's about the size of a handheld transistor radio (hahahaha, whatever that is, mine was red in 1978). I bought it refurbished or second-hand because a new one costs too much. I buy a $55 AT&T pre-paid wireless card for 100 gigabytes per month. It sounds simple, but it was hard to figure out. 

First I took the device to an AT&T store and they set me up on a $65 plan. I was told it was unlimited. That was $10 more than I had seen advertised, but I thought it would be worth it not to run out of data. 

It was not worth it, it was not unlimited, and the price kept changing every month, up. Finally, when I was automatically charged by-the-byte for going over whatever random number they decided was past unlimited, I cancelled it.

I went to Walmart, got the card, set up the hotspot, now I'm rolling. That was not an easy process, though. It took a couple of days of trying over and over to get it going, and I can't even tell you what the magic combination was that finally worked. It just finally did. So far it's good, when I run out there are no overcharges. No internet, but no overcharges.

I was pretty excited when I read that internet was to be expanded to rural communities by using electric structures already in place (poles) to run fiber cable, but then I read that it was going to towns that already have good internet. Even small towns like Rotan or Loraine already have fast and large data service. I still think that incentivizing AT&T to replace their ground fiber would be a real good start.