The Spectrum of Life
When I acquired my house in Ithaca twenty-four years ago (1996), it is fair to suggest that the technological world looked a lot different than it does today. Back then, the important elements to consider in a home were to have water, sewer, electricity, gas and telephone connectivity. The first four were easy since the United States had had a century of infrastructure roll-out that insured that most every place had access to water and electricity and sewage was a municipal issue for which I qualified. I could have been required to put in an artesian well or a septic system if I was not within the municipality, but luckily I was. As for gas, the power companies have taken that on as a synergistic and long-lived service so I had access to that (a propane tank being the obvious fix if not available). Out here in Escondido, I have water and electricity but use propane and have a septic system. All good, but a municipal service for sewage and gas versus propane would have been better (after all I do use San Diego GAS and Electric). As for telephony, there was still the dominance in ‘96 of land lines and while cellular existed, it was not considered a replacement yet for land lines.
On the subject of land lines, I am sure I am in the last 50% of the country to conclude that land lines are outdated and unnecessary. I had kept them for convenience, just in case, but have actually found that they are a scary nuisance more than anything. A nuisance because who needs to pay for something you don’t need and scary because when that phone does actually ring I always wonder if something tragic has happened and the government needs to urgently reach me (or a telemarketer urgently needs to reach me). Let’s face it, phone books went away and when they went away that pretty much meant that anyone still keeping a land line is simply too lazy or uninformed to cancel it. There may be a few spots in the country where cellular service is bad, but they are fewer and further between by the day.
As for cable, which clearly existed as far back as my college days two decades before I acquired the Ithaca house (and even before that), it was a bit of a luxury since it was all about TV and getting more than one could capture for free on the airwaves. Thinking about that for a moment, television went from wireless to wired, which is really a head-scratcher in terms of what we have come to understand about telephony. I recall in college that the cable guys would come to the fraternity house and disconnect all the pirate connections to the main cable box for the main house TV in the front living room, and as the truck pulled out of the driveway, our resident engineers were back hooking up the pirated cable connections to the box again so that individual rooms could run coaxial cable to their own private TV’s for free. Of course, those days were before the signal boxes that are now needed to unscramble the feed from the incoming cable. In those days cable was 90% to improve reception (damn those rabbit ears!) and 10% about premium channels like the luxurious HBO. And of course there was no dream of streaming of pay-per-view. But by 1996 I wanted cable in Ithaca and was unfortunately told that I was outside the service area. End of story. So, I adapted and went with the reasonably well-established satellite TV, which was a choice between DirectTV and Dish. My pal Frank had been a big Dish venture investor, so I went with Dish (which soon after got gobbled up by DirectTV anyway).
So all my basic services were accessible through some medium or another and life was good. But then, by 2000, the advancing importance of the internet made broadband not just a neat concept but increasingly a necessity. What to do? Broadband was mostly the province of the wired cable world and I had no cable in Ithaca. So, I called the cable company again and was told that for them to run the cable to my house would cost $20,000. I had spent $15,000 in 1996 to bury 1,000 feet of telephone wires and remove the poles so that my views over the golf course would be unobstructed (How do I say this delicately? I hate telephone wire views.) But $20k for cable seemed too much, so I called my neighbor, a woman by the name of Clover Drinkwater (great New England name, right?). She and I had gotten off to a rough start, but had become good friends when I took the poles down and ran her wires underground to her house and replaced her gravel driveway in the process. I asked her if she would split the $20k with me and she said no since she had no use for cable. So I went to the next best choice, which was Hughes satellite internet. That had to be the worst tech upgrade of all time since I got about .001mbps of transmission bandwidth. Broad was not a word to use with that sort of width.
Eventually, I landed on Verizon DSL for internet and got a whopping 3mbps of download juice, which has sufficed for a dozen years now.
In my boredom of Coronavirus Retirement I have taken to cleaning out unnecessary expenses, as people do every once in a while. My most flagrant waste was at my Ithaca house on both TV and telephony/internet. I was paying ~$250/mo for DirectTV and ~$250/mo for Verizon land lines and DSL. I began by cancelling DirectTV and installed an AppleTV box. It’s what my kids do and it would suffice with the added use of my Cox Cable subscription (out here in Escondido). I have once wasted money on Slingbox to do all this, but gave up on that a long time ago. This all led to my cancelling my Verizon land line and inadvertently cancelling my DSL, which they described to me as a dead technology anyway. Suddenly I was back where I started without internet where internet is now as necessary to life as indoor plumbing.
I went back to the cable company, now merged into an entity called Spectrum. I was told I had cable access, but when the installer came he told my cousin Pete that the Spectrum construction people needed to get involved and that they would call within 72 hours. Surprisingly, they called in about 70 hours and told me I could have the cable brought the 631 feet to my house (it had shortened in fifteen years due to the University buying it for the golf course clubhouse) for a cost to me of $5,163. No-brainer, I agreed. I then called. Clover and told her what I had done. I did not trick her, but rather told her straight-up that I was doing it whether she wanted to split it or not and that she would then have free access to the junction box. She did the honorable thing and gave me a virtual handshake that she would split it with me and would contact Spectrum to get in the queue once the construction was done. Honesty and integrity occasionally have their immediate rewards.
Spectrum Construction just called and told me they were on the job and would get the permitting from the town. I asked if he was in Ithaca and he said he was. I asked if he knows my cousin Pete who owns Pete’s Cayuga Bar on Cayuga Street and he said he did, indeed. I said we needed to get a call when this got done so we could get the installer back. He said not to worry, he was on it and would prioritize it. The Spectrum of Life has suddenly turned in my favor…or at least in the favor of those like my kids and friends that get to use the house these days.