No phone or internet for 60 hours

At 12:30 pm on Tuesday, my phone line went dead. It may not seem like a big deal, but when you live in the boonies, a phone is a lifeline. Many of my neighbors lose service for 3 or 4 days when it rains. My line just gets a lot of static when it is wet outside. The phone lines here are above ground and date probably back to the 1950's, if they are that new. Seriously, in 1996, my neighbors finally lost their party line. You know, a party line is one phone line for several residences that is shared. There is not much privacy on a party line, but that was the way things worked out here. Normal dial-up speed is 56 Kbps. You get that if your city has copper lines and you live reasonably close to the telephone switching office. I have no clue as to the metallic makeup of our antiquated phone lines, but I'd bet that it is not copper, and the fastest I've ever connected is 26 Kbps. The more usual speeds are in the teens. Still, if I have an internet connection, I can check weather and mail, which is important when you are expecting an important email from your future boss.

I think I miss email the most. I can watch television for news and weather in a pinch, it is just not as convenient or specific to my location and needs. I've never been one to chat on the phone, but I do miss hearing from my daughter, and there is a feeling of isolation that is hard to describe. When I was sick, I went for several days without logging on or making phone calls, but I knew it was there. I knew that if I needed to call 911 or someone else to help, that I could. With no phone, there is no help. Most of my neighbors are in the same boat as me. None of us has a cell phone. Of my seven nearest neighbors, only one other couple has a computer. I think they may have a cell phone, but they also have a land-line. Cell phones just don't work in this valley. Almost no one can get a signal strong enough to dial out, and if a phone rings, usually you lose the call when you try to answer.

So when we lose power or telephone service, and need to call in to report such, we have to drive out of the valley to get a signal out-for those who do have a work related cell phone, or find some nearby Good Samaritan who will let you use their phone if they have a working line. Once, I drove 8 miles to the nearest payphone, but now even that phone no longer exists. So, assuming I find a friend a few miles away who has phone service, and call Bellsouth/AT&T to report the outtage. AT&T treats me rudely, acting as if I am a second class citizen because I don't have a cellphone. They assume it is because I can't afford one. They do not believe that there are places where there is no service. They stupidly ask for an email address as a contact, forgetting that when one has dialup, one does not have email access. My elderly neighbors have it worse than I do. All of them are in ill health. The women have suffered heart attacks and strokes, the men have suffered heart attacks and cancer. They NEED 911 service. Today, my neighbor with cancer drove all the way to town to his daughter's house(almost 20 miles) to report the outtage. When he contacted AT&T, he got the same attitude as I did. The neighbor who loses service every time it rains gets even worse treatment. Bellsouth/AT&T does not seem to care that she's had a couple of heart attacks and lives alone. They send people out, each one with a different excuse or reason why she loses service and why it is now fixed after they work on it. Of course, it is only 'fixed' until the next time it rains. Bellsouth/AT&T doesn't seem to care about the poor people who live on this loop. Cell phones are the wave of the future for most of America, so I doubt that Bellsouth/AT&T will even consider spending the money to upgrade the phone lines for the 32 people who live on our road in this pocket valley. We don't matter.

I picked this place for its remoteness and beauty. I seriously doubt we will ever have cable TV, garbage service, county water, pizza delivery, or reliable cell service without a satellite directly overhead. We do have satellite television, and at least one person can afford satellite internet. The cheapest satellite ISP runs about $70/month, and that is the only option other than our 26Kbps dialup, and since most valley residents are of my generation and older, most do not have a computer at all, and if they do, it is certainly hard to afford $70-$100 a month on a fixed income or a rural Georgia income. Why can't the phone company upgrade the lines so that we could have DSL or cable ISP as a part of President Obama's surge to give everyone equal access to phone and internet. I know there are programs for free trackphones, but that wouldn't solve the problem here. Why can't they make a cell phone that can find a satellite or bounce a signal over the ridge to find a cell tower? The people of this valley would just like to have the same service as everyone else. I'd settle for 56K dial-up. Soon, I will have to give up my internet service, not because I can't afford it, but because downloading updates takes days and very often the files are corrupted. I already had to give up Google Earth because I could not download the updates and the program quit working without that update. My Adobe reader has a similar issue and needs upgrading. If the phone rings while the update is downloading, about 50% of the time the file is corrupted. Thunderbird, Mozilla, Adobe, AVG, and other programs update frequently, and when data is transferring at 14 Kbps and the file is 35Mb, you do the math on how long it takes. Realize, too, that even though the math says 840kbpm, the line isn't continuous, and in reality is takes about 5 or 6 minutes to download something that is 1 Megabyte in size. For a 35 MB file, it would take at least 6 hours, and you just hope that no one calls during that time as that corrupts the file.


A long time ago I heard a rumor that this valley might be made into a reservoir for power generation. It would be a small but deep reservoir, 4 miles from the dam end to the opposite end, and about a mile wide. The ridge tops are at 1400 ft and the valley is between 750 and 900 feet. The lake would be several hundred feet deep, and some quick math yields that such a reservoir would hold 6.7x10 11th power, or 6,700,000,000,000 gallons. I guess they decided to use Antioch and Heath Lakes instead and Oglethorpe Power developed a plant 20 miles to the west of here over at Rocky Mountain, which is now a state fishing and recreational area. When I first heard these rumors, I did not give them much thought. Then a few years ago, I read about imminent domain, how the government could come in and basically take your land 'for the public good'. I know my ridges are National Forest and that the government already owns them, but the idea that the Forest Service would annex my land as greenspace or biosphere space still seemed like a remote possibility. Perhaps I have read too many conspiracy theories, but I am beginning to wonder why no utilities or county offices seem to care about our valley. I wonder if they could know something we do not? So I stop and think about what that could be. What could they know? My conspiracy theory got legs a few months ago while watching the news. As it turns out, the Army Corp of Engineers has forbidden the state of Georgia to use the water from Lake Lanier as drinking water. Currently Atlanta and her suburbs, as well as a few other Georgia communities downstream, remove water from the Chattahoochee River and use it as drinking water. Wastewater is treated and returned to the river, which then flows to Alabama and Florida. The Corp has ruled that the massive lake and it's emerging river can only be used by the state of Georgia for recreation, not drinking water. Florida and Alabama have those rights. So,,,,, I ask myself, what will the city of Atlanta do? Would they not be in the market for another reservoir, one they could control without Army CoE involvement, a reservoir that would probably be 3000 acres in size? The ridges that would hold this reservoir are already Federal land, part of the Chattahoochee National Forest. The valley floor is private land and in this day and age, no one would think twice about taking the land via imminent domain for the greater public good. Could that be the reason for the lack of development and repair or maintenance of existing infrastructure like roads and phone lines? I hope not.