Text 9188, 74 rader
Skriven 2010-07-11 06:21:56 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
   Kommentar till text 9077 av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Cellphone woes
======================
Replying to a message of Robert Bashe to David Drummond:

 RB> David Drummond wrote to Robert Bashe on Saturday July 10 2010 at
 RB> 07:38:

 RB> [No phone service?]
 MV>>>> Sorry, I have problems accepting that.

 RB>>> Better start, then. We aren't talking about the outskirts of
 RB>>> Chicago, Dallas or New Orleans, but places like West Texas and the
 RB>>> far west and northwest, where there are often also no roads (or at
 RB>>> least paved roads) over areas of several tens or even hundreds of
 RB>>> square miles. It's a big place.

 DD>> But only a spit in the ocean compared with central Australia - and
 DD>> they have phone service out there.

 DD>> Admittedly it's not via land lines, they get subsidised satellite
 DD>> phone (and Internet) services.

 RB> I assume, however, you're talking about communities, or in the case of
 RB> isolated farms, about true satellite phones. That would naturally be
 RB> possible anywhere, but the USA - at least the parts that are really
 RB> isolated and essentially uninhabited - has a different structure (no
 RB> farms out in the wilderness, no settlements, just an occasional
 RB> cabin).

At least in most of the US midwest the phone lines are buried.  A lot of the
farms
around here have one, sometimes two satellite dishes.

As an aside, back in the early 1970s my folks lived in Oakland, CA.  Yet they
subscribed to local cable TV service - one could receive 13 broadcast channels
there without any special antennas.  I asked dad why they were paying for
something
they could get free, and he pointed out that cable programming had features not
available
from the broadcase stations.  That year, Kaiser Broadcasting, cable channel 44,
had
higher ratings than any of the broadcast stations - their evening prime-time
programming
consisted mainly of 1950s era sitcoms, and the viewers preferred them to the
dreck that
was being broadcast at the time.

 RB> If anyone has a cabin out in the woods, he generally doesn't live
 RB> there (just goes to hunt and fish), and if he has a satellite phone,
 RB> he buys it himself. However, there is no normal phone service to such
 RB> outlying places, and I wasn't talking about merely isolated
 RB> settlements reachable by road (phone lines and electic lines are
 RB> generally put on poles beside the roads in the States), but about
 RB> areas without settlements and just possibly a cabin here and there.

In rural areas most phone lines have been buried, although they are still along
the sides
of the roads.  In cities the phone lines are still on poles except in newer
developments
that have both phone and power lines buried.

 RB> Such areas aren't rare in some parts of the USA, but are doubtless
 RB> hard to grasp for Europeans with their high population densities.
 RB> We're absolutely overrun with settlements and people here, and
 RB> naturally the infrastructure is highly developed. After reading what
 RB> Bjorn wrote a while ago, I'm not sure if even the northern parts of
 RB> the Scandanavian countries are as isolated as some areas in the
 RB> States.

 RB> Cheers, Bob

 RB> -!- GoldED+/W32 1.1.5-0613
 RB>  ! Origin: Jabberwocky System - 02363-56073 ISDN/V34 (2:2448/44)

--- FleetStreet 1.19+
 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)