VT library stats & pitiful stories from the digital divide

The Boston Globe [via Associated Press] has a short article comparing bringing broadband to rural America to the rural electrification program which finally wired up the last of Vermont towns in the early 60s. The story is what you would expect, except that it’s a little maddening that the options offered are 1. wait for broadband and suffer with dial-up, or 2. nothing. The byline of East Burke points to a town with a teeny library that is open 12 hours per week. West Burke has a larger library but it’s still not large enough to have a website. According to the VT Department of Libraries’ statistics it doesn’t have a single public access computer. Lyndon is the closest town with high speed at their library. Not too far, but still several miles.

Doing a quick autofilter on the DoL’s list shows 183 public libraries in the state of Vermont. Ten have dial-up internet access. Thirteen have nothing. Seventy-five libraries have no wireless internet access. It’s possible I’m reading the statistics wrong, but this is fewer libraries with internet than in 2009. I sure hope I am reading the charts wrong.

Dial-up user Val Houde knows this as well as anybody. After moving here four years ago, the 51-year-old mother of four took a correspondence course for medical transcription, hoping to work from home. She plunked down $800, took the course, then found out the software wasn’t compatible with dial-up Internet, the only kind available to her.

Selling items on eBay, watching videos, playing games online? Forget it. The connection from her home computer is so slow, her online life is one of delays, degraded quality, and “buffering’’ warning messages. So she waits until the day a provider extends broadband to her house.

4 thoughts on “VT library stats & pitiful stories from the digital divide

  1. You’re not reading the charts wrong. Of the three libraries in towns near here, all three had wireless networks with at least basic dsl-grade connectivity two years ago. Now only one still offers wifi, and all have had to cut their hours of operation drastically.

  2. The digital divide is definitely still “dividing”. I gave up on having internet at home because dialup is useless these days, and satellite is more than I can afford. I keep getting my hopes up. EC fiber might reach me, not sure. It is quite frustrating.

  3. What kind of cell phone reception does VT have? The answer might be to forget about waiting for the wires to be strung and leap directly to a MiFi.

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