Delight About Data in Dubois

Finally, the long wait was over. We locked the door behind us and went to close on the sale of our New York City house.

Afterwards we headed off in rush-hour traffic toward the Holland Tunnel. Four long days of driving later, we returned to the place we now call home, this small remote town in the mountains of Wyoming.

Stopping at Superfoods to buy a few essentials, what to my wondering eyes should appear! There at the upper left on my phone was the word “T-Mobile,” beside 3 splendid bars of signal.

Our impoverished, second-class-citizen roaming days were over. This wasn’t news as good as the long-awaited sale of our New York house, but it sure made me happy.

“The new T-Mobile is all about bringing value and accessibility to everyone,” T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted recently, “particularly underserved customers and their communities.”

His company awaits a decision from the Federal Communications Commission about a merger with Sprint that, T-Mobile says, would improve service to remote rural areas. But I feel like we’ve already won. It was as if he was waiting there for us, holding out a beautiful welcome-home gift.

I took the image above a few days later, during a hike way up-mountain, near the Continental Divide. Clearly the broadband reach is truly broad.

We switched to T-Mobile ages ago, back in New York, when we consolidated plans as our children got cellphones of their own. Moving to remote little Dubois years later was white-knuckle time. Would there be any coverage at all?

There was, but it was lame. T-Mobile had contracted with the local provider for roaming service, but clearly it was a stingy contract. We got unlimited phone service, but we’d be kicked off data service after only a day or two every month. No amount of complaining either explained or solved this problem. We had to content ourselves with Wifi in cafes when in town. When we traveled to a large city, we would revel in the full coverage.

There was one compensation: the magnificent team of T-Mobile customer service agents in Meridian, Idaho. They truly get it about working remotely in a remote location, and they told me several very useful things.

First, and best of all, when I complained of lousy coverage at our house, an agent asked for my delivery address and promptly sent us a Nokia 4G LTE cellspot. It’s like a small short-range T-Mobile cell tower right inside our house.

(Now T-Mobile is selling the Coolpad Surf, a similar item run off a rechargeable battery. For $72 and a data plan, you can take your 600 MHz mobile tower anywhere. T-Mobile says its aim in selling the device is to bring service to rural areas.)

They also told me about Digits. I wanted a new local cellphone number, so my Wyoming friends wouldn’t deny my calls that were coming from my unrecognizable New York area code. But I didn’t want to lose my old contacts in the 917 area either.

The T-Mobile folks in Meridian told me that the Digits app would allow me to have 2 lines on the same phone, with two different ring tones. I added a 307 line for another $10 a month. As they say in New York, bada-bing, bada-boom.

For many months, I’d been hearing rumors that T-Mobile was going to build a new tower here. The agents in Meridian, Idaho, even said so. But who knew where, or when?

According to PC Magazine, T-Mobile won licenses to serve many rural areas in a 2017 auction, but has had to wait for local TV stations to move their frequencies to lower channels in order to accommodate cell service. Judging from the company’s service-area map, we still don’t get full 4G LTE service in the area surrounding the town, but I can still browse websites while hiking in the badlands now or shopping in town.

Who knows when we might actually get the new super-fast 5G service here? Looking at the recent press about 5G, I’m not sure I really care. An article in CNET says that 5G is being built on a 4G backbone, which may only enhance the capabilities of the service we now already have. I don’t watch movies on my phone, and I work at home at my desk, so why do I need it?

What a charming coincidence that, in the very week that I left the city behind, I left behind the last vestige of any need to be there. To be fair, T-Mobile service was sub-par in our Brooklyn house anyway, blocked by God knows how many walls and tree trunks. It was pretty challenging to make phone calls once we ditched the land line. In this house, with our personal cell tower, it’s great.

Here we have unsurpassed Internet service, fast and convenient online shopping (and free delivery with Amazon Prime), and wilderness hikes a few miles away. Our neighbors are horses and eagles and sometimes moose. We also have solid cellphone service at last, here as well as almost anywhere else.

The word “remote” has lost its negative overtones, and now applies only to our mode of communication and physical distance from heavy traffic.

Why on earth would I live anywhere else?

© Lois Wingerson, 2019

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