The Harsh Reality of Suburban Broadband

Like millions of other Americans and many of New York City’s “bridge and tunnel” crowd, I live in the ‘burbs. While I do a great deal of travel for my full-time job, I am also classified as a “mobile” employee, so I’m not formally attached to an office–I’ve been issued a company laptop and they pay my monthly broadband, cellular and phone bills, which are in the form of an AT&T (T) Callvantage VOIP account.

Currently, I’m a cable modem subscriber. I pay approximately $65 per month for Optimum Online’s boost plan, which gives you up to 5Mbps/30Mbps in theoretical upstream and downstream bandwidth. In practice, however, I’ve become accustomed to a number of service interruptions, where my broadband can go down for hours at a time, and days where the local XBOX kiddies and torrenters are clearly over-saturating the network. But I tolerate this because I have very few options for broadband in my immediate area.

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