Narrow Minded Geeks

I confess - I’m guilty of it just like many other people. What I’m talking about is the state of mind that people fall into when they start to think that the rest of the country is just like them, with the same problems and the same choices.

The actual truth is a lot different, and for me it takes a regular Whack on the Side the Head (to borrow a phrase from Roger von Oech) to keep me from regressing into the stereotyping trap.

So while I was talking to Virgil the other day (he’s a friend who lives in the eastern part of L.A. about 30 miles away from me), I got my Whack administered when he told me he can’t get broadband in his neighborhood. Their cable company doesn’t offer broadband and he was told that his house was two blocks outside of the boundary where he could get DSL. He even checked into a satellite uplink setup and they still want over $500 for the equipment and about $75/month.

Now this just didn’t make sense to me because we both live in the metropolitan area of LA. It’s not like he lives out in some rural valley where you schedule your trips into town. We’re talking one of the largest urbanized areas of the world – the proverbial concrete jungle that goes on for a hundred miles. Furthermore, Virgil lives in a pretty nice neighborhood of middle to upper class suburban homes where you would expect the demand to be pretty high for broadband.

I guess what struck me the most was that I’ve had DSL for over three years and I guess I just assumed that everyone in the LA area had a choice of either DSL or cable broadband if they wanted it.

I started thinking: If Virgil can’t get broadband in Los Angeles, then how can broadband be spreading so fast through out the country? It makes me suspicious of industry statistics that claim 50% of home internet users now have broadband. Seems sort of unlikely now doesn’t it? If you go to the website DSL reports, you can do a test to see if your house is within 18,000 feet of the central office, which is apparently the limit for reliable DSL service. For those of you who forgot your high school math, that’s about 3 ½ miles.

Now I know that there are a heck of a lot of homes in this country that are more than 3 ½ miles from a central phone office, and who also don’t have broadband cable running all the way out to their houses. These rural folks have electricity, and phone service and they get their TV from a little satellite dish mounted on the side of the barn. Maybe these numbers are extrapolations from polls taken in urban areas, or maybe they have users mixed up with households. For instance, I have one DSL account, 4 people who share it, and 7 different e-mail addresses. The statistics could vary quite a lot depending on which one of those numbers you are counting.

Sometimes I think that the enormous tech industry in the U.S. is so totally insular and hyped up on themselves that they have completely forgotten about the guy who works all day at some regular non-technical job and is struggling to protect his own version of “the simple life.” He doesn’t have 3 computers networked to a DSL modem with internet connections to a media server and wireless connections to his internet enabled refrigerator. He doesn’t even own a laptop and can’t imagine why someone would lug one to Starbucks to surf the net. The only thing that really connects this guy to the high tech industry on a personal level is his cellphone, which he bought so his wife can contact him when he is out on a job to ask him to buy milk on his way home.

After braving the crowds at CES in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago, I’m pretty sure that the majority of technical enthusiasts (i.e. geeks) that I saw there have very little contact with the folks who are labeled “late adopters.” Maybe it would be a good idea to set up a revolving program to send all these account executives of high tech firms out to roam the country in a mobile home for a month each. They would certainly get a whole new perspective on the broad profile of the American consumer. I’ll drive.