I remember the days of dial-up on the acreage. We started with a modem that gave us 14.4Kbps...a luxury at the time. Slowly we got 28.8Kbps...36.6Kbps...54Kbps. Nice, but still slow. I remember leaving Napster on overnight; I'd get around 100MB of downloads while I slept.

Nowadays, I have a 9.8Mbps connection and can get 100MB in less than a minute (eight seconds, theoretically). But my parents are still out there with their 56K connection. It's even worse, since something's happened to the phone lines...they usually connect at 28.8K instead.

Alberta Communication Cable Services is hopefully going to change that. They recently set up a wireless tower nearly nextdoor to my parents' acreage, and charge $40 a month for 1.5Mbps high-speed access. That doesn't seem fast to myself, but it was around the speed I had when I first signed up for cable internet back in 2001. And that was a world of difference. It's nearly 60 times faster than what my parents are used to.

My brother also recently got high-speed internet. He can probably relate to how much it changes your online experience. Night and day. In the days where webpages are taking up more and more bandwidth, hopefully it'll make my parents' online experiences that much more enjoyable.