Growing up in rural Southern Oregon did not seem to me to be such a great thing at the time. As far as I was concerned, it only meant that extra, unnecessary work needed to be done to generate the basic necessities of life. If you wanted to stay warm in the winter, you had to cut, split and stack wood all summer long. If you wanted food, you had to slop hogs and gather eggs and pull weeds in the garden, and do all sorts of other boring, difficult chores every day. If I wanted shelter, I had to help my dad build another addition on to our trailer. Life didn’t seem fair. Nothing was simple. I wanted a laid-back, chore-free city lifestyle and I wanted it badly. But it did not make any difference how much I complained, because I would always find myself back at that same old head-high woodpile on what seemed like every weekend morning while growing up. How nice it would be, I thought, to buy eggs and butter from the store and to live in a garden-free tract house complete with central heating, right in the middle of a big city.

Now I understand how fortunate I was that I did not grow up in the city like so many others have done. Sure, living in a rural area means working a lot harder for some things, but it also means drinking clean, pure water straight from the ground and having your closest neighbor nearly a mile away. It is a slower –paced lifestyle, far from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Unfortunately, the places in America like the one where I grew up are almost always the very same places that are hopelessly left out of the technology loop. It can sometimes seem like the rest of the world is punishing those who choose a simpler lifestyle in the rural areas of the United States. However, it’s not a sinister scheme and it’s nobody’s fault. It is just pure economics: the cost of providing the services to sparsely populated areas outweighs the financial reward for most service providers. The numbers just do not add up now, and they probably will not anytime soon. This means that services like high-speed Internet, which are taken for granted in populated areas, can be virtually unavailable in rural America. It is not fair, but that is how it is.

I know what it is like to be missing out on these services. Throughout my high school years, my family used “rabbit ears” to get television reception, and we shared a phone with the neighbors on either side, a system known as the “party line” in which conversations were seldom private. I understand many of the problems and challenges of living in rural American, because I grew up there. Back then Internet wasn’t invented yet, but even to this day, the property where I grew up in Merlin, Oregon does not have cable or DSL service. And that’s why I am in this business, and why it makes me feel good to hear how excited people are when I tell them I can provide them broadband satellite Internet to their rural home or business. Please feel free to email me personally if you have questions about HughesNet Satellite Internet service.

Jason Lines

Founder

Acme Satellite Company

“Speeding is Not a Crime on the Internet.”