I just noticed that my letter to the editor of the Daily Star about rural broadband was published (back on February 15). I have pasted the letter at the bottom of this post.

The letter is part of my ongoing campaign to evangelize the need for affordable broadband connectivity in rural areas. I truly believe that if affordable broadband is not made available to what are currently “dialup-only” areas, once-thriving villages will eventually become ghost towns. On the other hand, if such connectivity is made available, then many rural areas can be transformed through better jobs, better education, and a variety of digital community-building initiatives that are currently impractical.

Sometimes you will hear people say “rural households can get satellite Internet, so they have broadband available to them.”

As I have described at length before, my opinion is that satellite Internet service is NOT broadband and never can be. In my letter I try to explain that in plain English in the context of recent efforts by Otsego County to get federal funding for improved broadband access.

On a brighter note, one positive step the federal government is taking in this field showed up recently on the special FCC site called broadband.gov. The agency has posted a test that anyone can use (rural or sub/urban) to check their connection’s speed. This test evolved out of growing suspicion that most broadband providers claim to provide higher performance than they actually deliver. (For example, I pay for a download speed of over 1,000kbps but as you can see from my test result, I get nothing like that.)

I urge you to test your own connection. In the meantime, here is my letter titled “Satellite Internet not same as broadband.”

Dear Editor,

Your coverage of Otsego County’s struggle to provide affordable broadband to rural residents is much appreciated by those of us whose property prices are being hit by the lack of broadband access. (“County’s request for Web funding denied,” Feb. 4.) I have seen neighbors move already, putting property up for sale because of the lack of broadband.

With all due respect to Rep. Betty Anne Schwerd, whom you quoted, satellite Internet service is not broadband.

A broadband Internet connection should support real-time trading, Voice over IP (like Vonage), video streaming (like YouTube and NetFlix), and Virtual Private Networking (VPN is required for many telecommuting jobs).

Satellite does not support these core broadband functions, as stated on the website of HughesNet, one of Otsego County’s two main satellite providers. The other provider, Wild Blue, is not accepting new customers in parts of Otsego County due to capacity issues. These can cause a big drop in performance. As a HughesNet customer, my median download speed is 258kbps, much slower than the “headline rate” of 1.6mbps for which I pay $70 per month.

Cheap dial-up delivers 56kbps plus better latency than satellite (which will always be weak in this regard because every bit travels 45,000 miles into space and back).

Sadly, lobbyists for cable and phone companies, fighting requirements that they serve rural customers, have tricked politicians into thinking that “everyone in rural areas can get broadband thanks to satellite.” This is deceptive at best. Satellite Internet is not broadband and, if there’s no broadband where you live, you cannot participate in all the opportunities that the Internet affords. As a result, the value of your property, like mine, will continue to decline relative to areas that have broadband.

Stephen Cobb
Cherry Valley

I just spent my evening at the Opera. Not the fat lady sings kind of opera, more of a browser with wings kind of thing that just happens to go by the name Opera. And I am really impressed (even though I’m tone deaf and can’t tell a libretti from a Lambretta).

I have checked out the Opera browser several times in the past and each time was impressed at the way successive versions added new features, often ahead of IE (not hard to do) and Firefox (quite a bit harder but Opera has been doing it). However, I did not feel compelled to make it my default browser. When Google Chrome came along, seemingly faster than Firefox and with good stability, I made it my default browser. The recent emergence of the Mac version of Chrome into beta meant I could run it on both of my work boxes (one a PC, the other a Mac–yes, when it comes to tech–I go both ways).

But the latest Opera, version 10.10, has really impressed me and may become my new default. I was particularly interested in a combination of three capabilities that might be unique to me, but could make a difference to many other users.

First capability: An integrated email application that can read Eudora files. (For the younger generation, Eudora was a very popular email application last century and I still use it today because it’s reliable and easily searchable. Unfortunately, the makers of Eudora abandoned it many years ago and it’s starting to show its age.) I’ve been looking for a Eudora replacement and Opera might be it. I had been reluctant to give up Eudora’s trusty filter/folder system of message management but Opera replicates it while using a more flexible system of “views.”

Second, there is a Turbo feature that speeds up browsing on slow connections. Regular readers of this blog will know that my home office connection to the Internet is via satellite, specifically HughesNet, which can be very slow at times. Tada! Opera Turbo helps me cope with that.

Third, regular readers of this blog know that HughesNet makes it hard to access my own blog. (Something so weird I made a video about it.) But guess what, Opera sees my blog even when Firefox and Safari and Chrome and IE7/8 do not! Yes, it sounds crazy, but it is verifiable (a video of this phenomenon in action is coming). So there is no other way to put it: Opera works when the others don’t. (And no prizes for figuring out with which browser I am writing this.)

There’s a bunch more cool stuff in Opera 10.10 that I have not fully explored yet, including file and photo sharing and audio streaming (the audio thing was the source of the “worth a listen pun” in the blog post title). Even though Opera does not have a large share of the notebook and desktop browser market, the company is clearly pushing ahead with innovations and picking up enthusiastic users in the process. The company is also well established in the mobile and embedded browser market (check out the browser in your Nintendo Wii).

Over the next week or so I will be checking out more features and, if this whole HughesNet workaround capability pans out, I will be posting my impressions here.

I have just uploaded my “HughesNet DNS Fail” video to YouTube but you can watch it right here. To be honest it is not my most polished video work, but I think it gets the job done. I have another one in the works that might be more effective. The plot goes like this: At times when HughesNet refuses to show me my own blog–yes, this very blog that you are reading–I can reach it via my iPhone over the AT&T Edge network. One of these days I am going to get really calm and centered and call HughesNet support with iPhone in hand and try to explain the flaw in their DNS ways one more time before I call in the sharks.

This is a quick post to highlight the video I just uploaded to YouTube. Probably not my finest mixed media effort, it’s a quick screencast to demonstrate the fact, oft-mentioned to friends and colleagues, that the $80-per-month HughesNet Satellite Internet service which I get at my house “blocks” access to my blog.

(10/2/2009: Video link updated. For the video, click here.)

In fact, even as I write this, I am being forced to eat a veggie pannini at Stagecoach Coffee in Cooperstown so I can use their free WiFi to get to my blog to post this on my lunch hour. As you can see in the video, accessing my blog via HughesNet  “normally” results in a DNS Lookup Error. However, there is nothing wrong with the blog, as can be demonstrated with DownForEveryone, which I demonstrate in the video.

I have reported this problem to HughesNet but they tell me it must be a problem with my web site or web hosting company. Obviously the problem is NOT with my web site or host. I am pretty sure the problem is HughesNet DNS. I even demonstrated this to HughesNet by running Anonymizer which, as shown in the video, intercepts the HughesNet DNS and makes my blog accessible over the very same HughesNet connection that said “DNS Error.”

My speculation that this problem occurs because I am frequently critical of HughesNet, on this and other blogs, is indeed speculation. But you don’t have to be ultra-paranoid to think it mighty strange that my HughesNet connection, which can reach Google.com but not Cobbsblog.com, is fishy. It certainly stinks.

So, I spent this Saturday fixing things. First there was the font problem with my blog, a classic case of a web site  looking fine in every browser but Internet Explorer. I finally cracked the right code in the css file to get it to look right in IE as well as the other browsers (change font size from 60% to 10pix).

Then there was the problem of actually getting to my web site, which has been “off the radar” lately where radar = surfing on a HughesNet satellite connection. I am writing this post by running Anonymizer and routing my browser through their servers because Hughes obviously has a serious DNS problem that I am not going to solve by calling their tech support folks in India. All of which got me thinking about my how my Dad spent his Saturday mornings…Roll back in time about four decades and we see no Internets, no blogs, no browser isses. But forty years ago there were other things that needed fixing and tweaking, like the ignition timing and carburettor settings on the family car.

Today, these things are handled electronically. Fuel injection has done away with carburettors. Most people I know never think about gapping their plugs. But back then Dads were expected to deal with such things. So then and now = bent over a warm engine v. hunched over a hot laptop?

Of course, while I’m tweaking my blog, my wife is researching her medical condition on one computer while backing up a flakey hard drive on another. Times have changed and roles have expanded. But later in the day, when she suggested scrambled eggs and bacon for supper, it felt a lot like old times.

Well, I’m back…after 4 days of being kept from my own web site by my ISP, the increasingly notorious HughesNet, about which I have written before. In fact, I still can’t surf to my blog, unless I use a proxy server and bypass the HughesNet DNS.

So I am running Anonymizer, a very clever program that lets you surf the web without revealing your IP address. The program does this by routing your browser’s requests to visit a web site, like my blog, through its own DNS servers, thereby avoiding, in my case, the apparently foobar DNS at HughesNet. There are other ways of doing this, like surfing via anonymouse.org, but they tend to flash ads on the screen to pay for their service. Alternatively, you can buy a subscription. What I’m doing right now is use a 7-day free trial of Anonymizer.

Let me make this clear, I am using a 7-day free trial of Anonymizer so I can get to my own web site. I have not called HughesNet about this problem (calls to HughesNet support should be avoided by people with high blood pressure according to my reading of the Hughes forum on DSLReports). In a few days I am headed down the Monetate office in Conshohoken for a week. I know I can reach my blog from there. When I get back I will see if the problem as gone away.

p.s. So far I am liking Anonymizer. It has a simple interface for turning the service on and off and it manages to do this without disrupting browsers sessions.