Barbara Stanley is talking on a speaker phone to a tech support person from Charter Communications. Stanley, who runs a graphics arts business out of the attic of her home on Arlington Court, should be checking her e-mail and putting up a Web site for a client. Instead, she's fussing with a broken Internet connection. Ken, a senior technician, walks her through a series of steps to try to diagnose the problem. She alternately reboots her two Apple computers, crawls under her desk to fiddle with cables and reads information to him off the monitors.
Nothing seems to help.
Stanley has been on an odyssey for more than a year to find a reliable means of sending and receiving data over the Internet at high speeds. The journey has not ended yet. Because I do so much file transfer with my vendors, I needed a faster way to transfer data. In reality, the fastest speed they can get is about 50K. Until about a year ago, there were few ways to get higher speeds, and they were pretty expensive. Depending on the company, you can buy DSL in a variety of flavors and prices.