It is difficult to appreciate the convenience of high-speed Internet access until you have to live without it. Most people in North America takes high-speed access for granted given it’s available in most locations via cable, DSL, satellite or Wi-Fi.
But if you happen to spend two weeks at a cottage in rural Prince Edward Island, it doesn’t take long to discover how living digitally without high-speed access is difficult and painful.
Faced with the prospect of no Internet access at all after discovering Rogers’ wireless Edge network isn’t data-friendly, we rigged up dial-up access after scrambling to buy the last US Robotics external modem in PEI.
After more than a week of experiencing the joys (sic!) of dial-up, it is obvious the Web is pretty much unusable without high-speed access.
To start, you can forget about video given using a 56K pipe is like trying to squeeze an elephant down a straw.
Browsing the Web is possible but dial-up forces you to become very selective. While Google is fairly dial-up friendly, the results need to be carefully scanned before deciding which Web site to check out. If you make a “mistake”, it can take minutes to recover.
If there a few sites you want to check out, it means opening the browser tabs, and then coming back many minutes later for them appear. The upside is you can really multi-task. For example, you could exercise, make breakfast, fix something around the house, AND still have time before the Web sites are ready to read.
This leaves e-mail, which is where dial-up works best – and that, my friends, is totally relative. It takes time but new e-mail eventually appears in your inbox, although an e-mail client such as Mail or Outlook seems to work better than GMail or Hotmail.
With the PEI holiday over, I’ll miss the lobster, red sand, beautiful sunsets and slower lifestyle. I will not, however, miss dial-up access.
