My assistant and I had a good laugh over something I did without thinking. It was the weekend, and I commented that none of the other homeowners in the development where I live responded to the email I sent out. She said, "Well, how could they?"

I'll explain.

I live out in a rural part of Missouri outside of Springfield. I live on acreage along with all my neighbors in a subdevelopment of large multi-acre lots. There are around 45 homeowners in the development, and we share a water system.

By circumstance, I was the first to be connected to our new 1G fiber optic service that took a full year to install and at least another year or two prior to that for planning and engineering. This fiber project was all a part of a USDA grant to bring high-speed internet access to rural parts of the US, and this was no trivial project. They had to laterally drill through a lot of rock to get here.

I thought it would be a good idea to write everyone in my neighborhood to explain the process of getting fiber up and running in their homes because there was no explanation of the process or a homeowner's options anywhere from the ISP (Internet Service Provider). I thought I was being helpful.

We're about nine miles from the nearest town, and for many of us, we can't see our neighbors from our houses. We get occasional email blasts to everyone, but few ever continue the conversation in part because whatever online service they have is data-capped, so they mostly use it for important matters or access email from work. There is only a small handful of us who pay close attention to connectivity, and apparently, most just go without it. It explains why I often get phone calls from neighbors and no email.

For those of us with the internet as a way of life, we can't imagine life without it. Out here, if you've never had it, anything internet-related is somewhat at arm's length from your daily life and almost abstract in some ways. Surfing the web has an entirely different meaning, and there is little requirement for a Zoom call. People here make do with what they have.

Common connectivity language I'd normally use in Seattle doesn't have as much meaning, and the terms are less familiar around here. You're either online or you're not. There isn't a discussion about speed, latency, fiber versus copper, mesh networks, CAT-6, 7, or 8 anything, and that doesn't even begin to cover mesh networks, AB, AX, G, and N routers, switches, etc. All of that is another language. What's a "router?"

One resident of nearby Rogersville was using his work computer to access the local Facebook group and said that fiber was now available to his house, but he had no idea how to go from the connection to his house to everything he needed to get online. Others chimed in that they too didn't know what to do next. One farmer raised the issue of connectivity to outbuildings. These issues are commonplace and not given a second thought in major cities, but this is still new.

From the day I moved here, I found a way to be online, costly as it was, because it had been a part of my world since online using DSL became available to homes around 1989 in the Seattle area and “dial-up” on a standard phone line for a few years prior. At the house here, I had two Starlinks, two PepWave modems aggregating cellular data from multiple carriers, all to make sure I was always online somehow. Even without fiber connected to the house, I still had 79 devices on the primary network, not including security and other safety devices. No matter what, I found a way to remain connected and working, even if I had to work in the Sprinter van that has its own state-of-the-art internet connectivity capabilities. Not only was I connected, I had redundancy.

Here I was, going on and on in my email about the details of my connection process, and I never thought about who was reading it and how and when it would be read. Consequently, even after two weeks, there wasn't a single reply.

Now that it's been an entire month since they were here working on the run inside the house, I count only seven homes in the neighborhood with the telltale pre-burial residential fiber line running from the group pedestal to their individual homes as we wait for line burial.

I suspect many of these homeowners have no idea how this could all change their lives and are in for a pleasant surprise, and some will wonder how they lived without it. While I consider my neighbors to be highly informed about world events, they have no idea what they are missing. In some ways, what I'm watching is like the transformation of neighborhoods when phone service became available for the first time. I know that one by one, each home will eventually connect, but I am still surprised by the very slow uptake.