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I've lived here five years now, and it's taken me that long to cross the Digital Divide that still exists in this country between those who take decent broadband for granted and those who must constantly say, "Actually, no, I can't Skype."Today, I finally have a connection at my home office that's on par with average DSL services, but it's not cheap and it hasn't been easy getting it. Over the course of this and four subsequent posts, I'm going to share the 12-year odyssey that brought me from the San Francisco Bay Area to where I am today -- a guy in an isolated mountain village where many people live without Internet access (or even voice mail, for that matter) who writes about technology -- and my struggles to drag just basic broadband from the digital First World to my more.. digitally underdeveloped home.

To understand how I got here, let's briefly revisit the era of the dot-com bubble, Twelve years ago this month, I got my first big break at South iphone case holds cards by Southwest, A now long-forgotten Web site I was working on as part of my journalism degree at the University of Missouri won the award for Best Current Events Site that year, besting the likes of "The Daily Show" and others, Within hours, I was offered a job at a "new-media magazine" -- also now long forgotten -- in San Francisco, I put my education on hold and moved west, arriving just in time for the carnage of the dot-com bubble burst, The digital Shangri-La I envisioned was crumbling, if it ever really existed in the first place..

Within months I was back in Missouri finishing my degree, and after 9/11 I found myself running a public radio station in a remote outpost in Alaska. That's where I discovered that being at an exclusive launch party or a talked-about TED talk is cool, but it's nothing compared with the rush of setting up an ad hoc cell phone network for a fly-in-only village of 700 people just below the Arctic Circle. After four years in Alaska and some time in Asia, I had little desire to return to the Bay Area, or any other city for that matter. I wanted to continue living in the places where technology was a more highly prized commodity, not just another monthly bill. Besides, as a Colorado native, it's tough to feel at home without being surrounded by soaring peaks. Those desires and life's unending chain of surprises led my family and me to settle here.

The dark green on that satellite image is all national forest, I iphone case holds cards can hurl a stone over my neighbor's property and land it within the forest boundary, We're 30 miles from the nearest supermarket or stoplight, so as you might guess, my broadband options are not plentiful, We purchased our house here in 2007 (literally the worst moment in modern history to purchase a home, I reckon) and at that time there was no cell service, no cable, no DSL, no WiMax or other fixed wireless service, no fiber, no Verizon 4G, In fact, all there was -- besides prehistoric dial-up that would only be capable of 28.8Kbps given the quality of our phone lines then -- was plenty of blue sky to aim a satellite dish at..

So in July of that year I began a long, painful relationship with satellite Internet service. You'd think it would be pretty clear who provides this kind of service -- probably the company that owns the bird in orbit, right? But it's more complicated than that. For years, American politicians have been promising to bridge the Digital Divide and connect even the most rural Americans to broadband Internet access. Satellite Internet is the stopgap measure that's been used to make good on this promise. The federal government has poured grant money into satellite providers, as well as a group called the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative that acts as a middleman between companies like Hughes, WildBlue/ViaSat, and DirecTV and local rural telecom co-ops that actually resell satellite Internet to customers like me.