Sadly many of us in Chatham would be happy with 5mbps up and 1mbps down

Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 10:21:01 -0500
From: evan keiser
Subject: Subject: RE:Chatham Internet

Dreadpiratejeff wrote:

” I would just be happy if they could provide better than 10MB/s to my home as other areas get 40MB/s service on their aDSL circuits.”

Sadly many of us in Chatham would be happy with 5mbps up and 1mbps down, seriously, the options here are that bad and many of us have tried everything from petitioning local ISP’s, attempting to work with Chatham Wireless (Formerly Blast) on building more towers with money out of our own pockets, going door to door for signatures, offering to dig fiber lines for free and much more but none of this ever came to be.

I grew up with some of the first true broadband in the country and recently during a visit to a friends home in rural Kentucky I found the options for internet in his area made us look like a third would country bandwidth wise. I just don’t believe the folks at Centurylink understand that our community is filled with commuters, people who work from home and are extremely tech oriented. For example every device in my house utilizes the
internet in some way  so if the daughter decides to watch a show on a hulu, Daddy’s VPN session times out and simple web browsing brings you back to the days of dial up.

My point here is that myself and many others have tried in every way possible by doing the leg work and even offering to do the manual labor in order to get everyone in our county proper internet to no avail and are getting to the point of looking into running our own colo/isp like some other small towns have opted to do. If anyone is seriously interested in working together to help provide the county with proper internet access, has a solution or any good ideas on how to get this done please let me know as we certainly have financial backers and an army of tech folk willing to work for it.

Much love,
Evan K