So one of our first orders of business was to secure some technology.  Come to find out AFTER we bought the house that the internet stopped just three telephone poles short of reaching us.  This is sort of a big deal since I work mostly from home.  There are services like satellite for service, but none of them would work for my needs due to latency (slowness) or data limitations.

So I contacted the local cable company to see if they would consider extending the line.  The person I called was none to helpful, just confirmed we could not get service to our site.  So I decided to go old school, while my wife laughed at me, and wrote two letters.  Yep, used a stamp and everything.  One went to the local office and an exact copy went to the corporate offices.  About a week later I got a call from the corporate office and a very nice gentlemen said he would have someone call me within 24-48 hours.  Oh well!

Oh well indeed, not 45 minutes later another person called and again I explained the situation.  He said he would get a technician assigned to come out and do an estimate on what it would take to extend the line.  Oh well again!

Oh well indeed, again!  🙂  About 1 hour and half later there was a knock at the door.  The technician said he had seen where the line ended up the hill and would be getting together an estimate.  Then he explained the gentlemen who had contacted him would get back to me once the estimate was complete. (skipping the oh well)

The next day the second gentlemen called me back.  He said the normal course of business was that if the estimate was less than $3000 then they just do it.  Anything above that the customer could pay for if they wanted the service.  He then explained it would cost $27,000 to extend the line for me.  WHAT!!!!!  It is only three telephone poles, maybe a couple hundred yards at most.   I thanked him kindly for his time and decided to not to get the line extended.

Long story that ends with us using wireless service from our cell phone provider.  It has data limits, but the speed is good (LTE) and has worked out well so far.