swgs: I live in southwest Nova Scotia (Canada), in a rural community. Broadband is available from the phone company (DSL), but only within the usual radius from their central offices. We are outside that range. Broadband is also available from the regional cable company, but we live on a road that has never had cable (and now most people have satellite dishes for TV). I actually organized a petition to try and get the cable company to extend their network to include us, but there aren’t enough people living on that road and I understand that it would simply not be cost-efficient for the cable company at this point.

Finally, a local computer repair guy who lives on our road has actually set up a local wireless connection for himself and shares it with his neighbours, but again, we are too far from him and there is too much of a difference in altitude (we are on a cliff, he’s at sea level), which means that we can’t get a clear line of sight. The only solution would be to set up two big (60 ft) towers at each end, and that would represent a pretty hefty investment and an engineering challenge.

As for satellite-based Internet, even two-way, I don’t think it’s realistic. I do a number of things over a secure connection, and I understand that, because of the latency, secure connections are atrocious over satellite (even slower than dial-up). Plus the weather can be brutal around here and I understand that Internet via satellite is more sensitive than satellite TV. Finally, last time I checked, there were only a couple of theoretically available satellite-based options (I don’t know anyone in the region who uses them), but they were both very expensive and untested.

So as you can see, it’s not for lack of trying… and we would be the very first adopters if anything became available! We are simply unfortunate at this point in time. Either I can find people to share the cost of the local wireless setup with (we are still looking into it) or the cable company gets a government grant and brings cable to our road or the phone company extends its DSL network to reach us. I am waiting for any one of these three things to happen. There are no signs of any changes in the near future.

Also, respect for using the iDisk on a modem connection! It’s been years since I use one but back in the days it was even catastrophic on ethernet and when I saw it at a friend’s via DSL it wasn’t particularly impressive either. So I wouldn’t have thought that using it on a modem connection was even possible.

It’s always been surprising to me to read that you are still using dial-up.