The Western Producer has for years covered the sorry state of rural internet.
The cycle is predictable: delegates to a farm meeting complain about broadband coverage, government makes a funding announcement, rinse and repeat.
Stories have circulated for years about parents driving their kids to fast food outlet parking lots so that they can use the restaurants’ wi-fi to do their homework.
We all know it’s bad out there, but the point was hammered home recently when a Western Producer reader and darned-good photographer opted to mail me photos rather than fight with her internet service.
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Paula Larson, who raises cattle near D’Arcy, Sask., in western Saskatchewan, rarely goes anywhere without her camera. The Western Producer has been the beneficiary of many of her photos over the years, but up till now she has always emailed them to me, the way you’re supposed to be able to do it in a first world country in the 21st century.
Except last week her photos didn’t come by email. Instead, an envelope arrived at the office with a thumb drive containing 26 digital photos accompanied by a hand-written note providing information about said photos.
Paula has been telling me for a while now that her internet service is bad, but I had no idea it was that bad.
Her trouble began a few years ago when she moved her house down the road. Cellphone coverage isn’t perfect, but trying to use the internet on her laptop computer has now become almost impossible.
Not impossible, she stresses, but so time-consuming, stressful and often laced with a few choice words that she hardly ever does it that way.
She can email photos if she takes them on her phone, and phone cameras are pretty good these days. But if she uses her digital camera, which she prefers, and then downloads the photos to her laptop and emails them that way? Fuggedaboutit!
So when she recently photographed a wide variety of rural scenes in her area, from ducklings on a slough to two bulls having an argument, she decided she wasn’t going to even try using the laptop.
“It would have taken so long to figure out how to make it work that I wasn’t going to bother.”
That’s when Canada Post was pressed into service.
And they call it progress.
