Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas
There are several comments here noting that small towns are pretty well wired. I’m fortunate to have just purchased a vacation home in rural Wisconsin (close to family). In DC, I have 100Mbps fiber, a free upgrade from FiOS from the 25Mbps I ordered, with the option to get a gigabit. At my other house, I have a 6Mbps DSL that only delivers 1.5Mbps at best, with a couple hundred Kbps upload. There’s a cell tower only a mile away, but hills and trees obscure the signal; still with two bars I can get 20Mbps on my iPhone. Can I get a reasonable data plan? No. All the data plans cost a lot for a little, and throttle you to 2G after a hundred GB or so of download per month.<p>My hope is to spend a good portion of every summer working remotely in Wisconsin. I’ll be hard-pressed to make video conferences and pairing sessions work, and I sure won’t be streaming many shows for entertainment in the evenings.