Rural Discrimination

I don't get it. Earthlink called us last week to say that we were "eligible" for DSL. They said they checked our lines and all was a go. We just had to wait for the equipment to come, golden! Being computer geeks, we were very excited, like "sugar plums dancing in our heads" excited.

Last night we got a phone call, a recorded disembodied voice, with bad news. Nope, we aren't eligible after all. Not being satisfied with that, I called Earthlink to talk to a real person. Seems that we are too far off the main road for the DSL signal to work. Shrug. Too bad. OK? (gosh, I hate it when someone says "OK?" when they are delivering bad news.)

Understand, we don't live that far off the main road. Sure we live on a dirt road, but the main road is just about 2/10ths of a mile away. There's a community near here where the town board set-up a deal with Pivot.net to provide DSL to everyone in the community's telephone exchange. Small town, population-wise, but spread over a large geographic area. Some of my friends live 10 miles off the main road, on dirt roads in the mountains. They get DSL if they want it. So the standard "A DSL connection works better when you are closer to the provider's central office" line just does not wash with me.

As I told the live voice I spoke with at Earthlink, it's Rural Discrimination.