Kathy Kirkland

PO Box 668

Ephraim, WI 54211

920/854-6174

kathkr@aol.com

April 19, 2004

Exclusive to Door County Advocate

Matrix Rebooted:
My Love/Hate Relationship with Door County Internet

“C’mon,” I plead, my face inches from the monitor. “C’mon....puleeeez.” I keep my tone friendly so as not to upset my computer. It’s in the process of downloading a massive Quark file, and the indicator says, “5 hrs, 21 min remaining.”

This is October of 2001. I had just moved from Southern California to Northern Door, and the telecommuting agreement I made with my boss hinged on the theory that I could be a magazine editor just as easily from 2,000 miles away as I could from down the hall. I sincerely pled my case: I had both a Mac and a PC, e-mail, access to our Internet server, fax, phone—what else did I need? She reluctantly agreed. A few weeks later, happily unpacking in Ephraim, the realization hits me: High-speed Internet was unknown in Door County. In California, a high-speed hookup was a given; nobody used dial-up anymore. Now my Ethernet card and I are up a creek—just north of Fish Creek—without a paddle.

Hours later, my Quark file still dribbles from the Internet server onto my hard drive. The week-long move has put me on a drop-dead editorial deadline. Even though the file has been Mac-Stuffed as small as possible, the counter still reads, “5 hours, 5 min.” Time has somehow stood still for my 56K modem, and I’m starting to see my own life passing in slo-mo as well.. I fling open my arms in front of my Mac, begging it to jump to warp speed. My friendly tone has become a teary squawk. Maybe it will go faster if I don’t watch it, I reason. I run errands and return to a file that has downloaded as “corrupt,” and the process begins again.

The next several days are occupied with phone calls to every Internet carrier I can think of. Only my local TV cable company offers high-speed Internet service in Door County, but it still won’t reach Ephraim for two months. I schedule an installation and practice staving off questions from California. Each time the phone rings, I pray that I won’t hear the now-copyrighted phrase, “You’re fired!”

Somehow, I fumpf my way through November and December, then become the gleeful owner of a cable modem box and high-speed Internet. The file that took five hours to download now takes five minutes! Oh, joy! Not only can I do my work, I can send co-workers photos of deer and meadows outside my home office window—by all rights, they should’ve fired me for bragging about my Door County lifestyle while they’re stuck in the La-La-Land of traffic, earthquakes and home alarm systems. But I stay employed and begin working much more efficiently.

Looking back now, I should have realized that my love affair with cable modem wouldn’t last. After a couple of months, the dreaded phrase “This page cannot be displayed” began appearing on my monitor. Sure enough, the orange light on my modem box was off, signaling that my signal was gone. I tried bonding with the young man who acted as tech support and, on bad days, as my therapist. I followed his instructions, performing tasks such as plugging and unplugging wires, entering subnet addresses and searching my “winipcfg” file. More often than not, however, my phone call was met with the recorded voice, “We are currently experiencing outages in Door County....”

My relationship with cable modem had developed into that Mother Goose rhyme: “When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.” If the service was down, they tried their best to fix the connection. If the connection was snail-slow, they suggested upgrading to their “gold” package that jacked up the base price. I agreed to pay more—but I hated myself for it.

By this time, it was mid-2003, and I’d become resigned to my love/hate relationship with cable modem. Oh, I tried to break it off once or twice. When DirecTV began offering local TV channels, I saw it as my way to ease out of the relationship. “Yes, we can cancel your TV service, but your Internet service will cost $10 extra per month,” a cheery salesperson informed me. “But why?” “For the access,” she chirped. “But I already have access,” I yelped. “I’ve been hooked up for a year and a half.” Though I don’t respond well to illogical penalties, what choice did I have? I was caught between a rock and my bank account. I needed high-speed Internet to make a living. No, I decided, I will not cave in and pay $10 a month more for fewer services! I’ll show them—I’ll keep all their services and suffer in silence!

The silence was broken two weeks ago when my friend Chris Risch, who lives at The Back of Beyond in Gills Rock called me and exclaimed, “We’ve got it. High-speed Internet.” Chris, a realtor, uses the Internet mostly for checking her e-mail, but teenage son Joey is an intense Internet user. I had heard that high-speed wireless service had come to Sturgeon Bay as long as a year ago, but it hadn’t made its way to Northern Door, and now it was all the way in Gills Rock? Chris said that Door County Computer, who owns the NEWWIS service, had just flipped the switch on a tower in Ellison Bay, and she and Joey were happy campers. I wanted to speak to Joey firsthand.

“It’s awesome,” he crowed. “With dial-up, if you’re playing Call of Duty with a bunch of other guys online, you can shoot at somebody but your bullet will go slower than a high-speed bullet, so you’re dead before it even reaches the other guy.” He confirmed that he was downloading music (iTunes—the legal way, good boy), and that his mother wasn’t upset by the phone being tied up. NEWWIS works directly from a small reflector dish on the roof to a tower (they live within the required 12-mile radius) and not through any phone lines. I grilled him for more information. He talked about playing guitar along with music online, chatting with friends and researching homework—not information useful for me.

I called Door County Computer for the hard facts: As I had suspected, my cable modem has several flaws that have slowed me down. For one, its download speeds are fast but it can upload at only half that speed (I knew it!). NEWWIS uploads and downloads at the same speed, 384 kilobytes per second, which is 50 times faster than my old 56K modem. Also, weather affects some high-speed Internet because signals come from about 24,000 miles away instead of 12 miles. Now that Ellison Bay’s tower has been switched on, Washington Island and Egg Harbor towers will be operational by July 1, with several other areas such as Sister Bay and Ephraim available for service by the end of the summer!

Aside from being able to dropkick my cable modem provider, service will cost me $15 less, and I already have an Ethernet card. The antenna/reflector dish will cost me about the same as other systems’ equipment, but I won’t have a modem box underfoot — everything but the connection to the back of my computer will be on the roof. I’ll get two months’ free service and a two-year payment plan for any equipment I need. NEWWIS even comes with three e-mail addresses, virus filtering and SPAM eliminator (no more Subject lines like “Viagr@a, Lev)itr@!”).

Soon, e-mails to friends will include pictures of a small dish on my roof as well as deer in the yard—proving that I can be rural without being a rube!

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