Judging by the number of responses I got to yesterday’s blog, both in comments left and e-mails, apparently Sunday the entire internet was suffering from a massive slowdown.

I heard from people from Florida to Texas and California, and north to Maine, and they all reported problems accessing the internet for several hours Sunday. These were not all Verizon air card users either. It seems like folks who use AT&T and Sprint air cards were having the same problems.

But I have to remember that technology has come light years in a pretty short period of time, and we’ve got it really good today. When Terry and I started fulltiming ten years ago, we had to lug our laptop computer up to the campground office, often pay a buck or two, and then we could plug into a telephone line and download our e-mail. We’d sign off, read it offline, write our replies, and then sign back on to send them.

Then they came up with a card that linked a cell phone to the computer, and if you held your head at just the right angle, didn’t sneeze, and the gods were in a good mood, you could get online at speeds that were just a little slower than driving across the country and delivering the message in person.

Mobile rooftop mounted internet dishes, as well as their tripod mounted counterparts, were a huge advancement in connectivity on the road, and for us, they revolutionized the way we did business. I would have never considered starting a website or selling our books, CDs, and subscriptions online before that. But being able to get online just about anywhere we could get a clear line of sight to the sky, and at reasonably high speeds, was the ultimate in luxury for us.

Back in the early days of the dish systems, there was a real battle between the people who advocated the automatic rooftop systems and those of us who had tripod models. There were rumors and wild tales about FCC and FBI agents driving through RV parks and rallies looking for the supposedly “illegal” tripod systems, and if you had one you could have your RV confiscated.

We also heard dire warnings about how dangerous an improperly aligned dish could be. At one Escapees rally, a vendor selling the automatic systems told a story about someone who walked in front of a tripod dish just when the owner transmitted an e-mail, and the “rays” drove an ink pen in the poor pedestrian’s shirt pocket through his heart.

Another dealer claimed that if I pointed my dish the wrong way, I would jam an airliner’s navigation system and blow it out of the sky. I responded in the Gypsy Journal that if that were true, every maladjusted high school geek and homegrown terrorist would be out in their back yards shooting down airplanes. Ahh, those were the good old days!

So overall, I guess we can’t complain if the internet has an occasional brain fart and slows down on us once in a while. We’ve still come a long way, baby!

Thought For The Day - Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

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For the most part, I have been very satisfied with our Verizon USB 720 air card, which we use in a Cradlepoint MBR 1000 Router. We enhance our signal with a Wilson Trucker cellular antenna and Wilson signal amplifier. We have used this system for almost two years now and have found it to be far superior for our needs over the Hughes Net dish we used for years before that.  Except for only a couple of occasions, way out in the boonies of West Texas, we have always been able to get online. 

But yesterday I was ready to throw the whole darned thing into the nearest dumpster!

We been sitting in the same spot here in Apache Junction for a week, and our download signal speeds have averaged from 1500 to 2200 kbps, with upload speeds of 145 to 220 kbps. (By comparison, about the best download speeds we ever recorded with the Hughes Net system was in the neighborhood of 750 kbps.) But about noon yesterday everything came to a screeching halt. Suddenly I could not get online at all, and when I finally did, opening any website or checking my e-mail took forever. More often than not, the system would time out before it would open a website.

We have experienced temporary slowdowns from time to time, but they are usually short term, no more than a few minutes usually. But until about 10 p.m. yesterday we were just dead in the water.

Terry picks up our router’s WiFi signal to get online, and she was just as slow. I took the air card out of the router and tried it in both of our laptops and in a USB port on my desktop, and even though we had five bars of signal strength, service was moving at the speed of sludge. The one speed test I was able to run showed a download speed of only 54 kbps! Updating the router firmware through Verizon’s Access manger did not help.

I don’t know what the heck was wrong, but then late in the evening, for whatever reason, suddenly the card was back up to normal speeds. I ran a check at Speedtest.net and we were back up to 1955 kbps download speed. Very weird. I don’t know what the problem was, or what fixed it. I hate computer gremlins.

While I was grumbling about the air card and beating my head against a stone wall trying to get online. Miss Terry was making up a batch of her homemade pizza dough, and about 5 p.m. we went over to her parents’ house and had our own pizza party.

Since I couldn’t get any work done online, I drowned my sorrows in piping hot cheese, spicy pepperoni, zesty sauce, and a crust to die for. I’m never going to lose weight.

Thought For The Day - Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.

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