As far as I can tell, there is no cell phone reception anywhere in the Town of Corinth. Consequently, in the office and at home, we continue to use a land line for nearly everything. My wife and I do own a Tracfone that we carry with us when traveling, but we don’t get incoming calls on it because we’ve not given the phone number to anybody. I’ve found it very handy when I’m away from home and need to make calls, but we use it on average less than 10 minutes a month.
Many incoming calls to the office, however, come in from cell phones, and I can almost always tell the difference between a cell call and one from a landline. With the cell, significant parts of the caller’s conversation will be unintelligible. I was taking an order for a subscription yesterday afternoon, and the caller had to repeat each section of the credit card number more than once because static and silence kept it from being clear.
New technology allows us to communicate more readily and more often. Because we’re still in thrall to the ease of it all, we’re getting less and less annoyed that the reception is generally bad. And many rural communities across the Northeast are in a huge hurry to sprinkle cell towers across the hilltops so that we can all have access to this marvelous tool. I’m not convinced that it’s worth such an effort. More communication is not necessarily better.
But just to show that I’m not tech-phobic, I do believe that access to a high-speed internet connection serves to bring economic opportunity to rural outposts like ours in central Vermont. Without DSL, we wouldn’t be able to run this organization out of this tiny town that’s 45 minutes from everywhere.
We all are becoming increasingly aware that local is good. But local and isolated is not necessarily so good. We can be justifiably proud that our local telephone company, Topsham Telephone, was way ahead of the curve in providing DSL service to its customers. And we can be smug in noting that some of the higher-rent districts adjacent to us are still struggling to bring it to their communities. Northern Woodlands – employing six people and communicating its message of stewardship to more than 20,000 – is living proof that high-speed internet can make a real difference for rural communities.