Over the years, my wife and I have been pretty well connected - electronically that is. Our work in technology provided incentive for us to get and stay connected. Indeed we are the reason they have fiber on our street of our old house - it was put in to support my wife's ISDN connection - first and only (we think) installation in our neighbourhood. That was in addition to the multiple telephone lines (all but one are now disconnected)
This has also spoiled us. We have a high speed WiFi network at home (known as fangnet) via aDSL, satellite T.V., mobile data though our cell phones.
So as we transition to road life, we have become aware of what the internet industry refers to as the "The Last Mile Problem".
The Last Mile is not the short walk prisoners on Death Row take to their doom, but rather that final connection between the high speed internet port and the consumer. We still have the cell phones and the satellite TV (if you haven't seen Dish's RV deal, you should), but the high speed internet is an issue.
We need it for work and pleasure. We've got a mobile hot spot from T-Mobile that supplements the cell phones and sort of works, but if we should stream a Netflix, that burns most of allocated data for the month. And the other problem with mobile hot spots is that they are only as good as the surrounding cell service. If there is a weak signal or a lot of people trying to use cellular data, things get unacceptably slow in a hurry.
Dish Network offers satellite internet - it looks very good - but it is hideously expensive - particularly at the data quantities we want.
We have not resolved the issue. Since we are currently based predominately in Castro Valley, we have a cable modem from Comcast when we are parked. But when we are not there...it's a problem.
There seems to be movement to solve the problem wirelessly, Google and others seem to be trying.
We will watch them with great interest since it is important for a Citizen of the Road to be connected.
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