While perusing mr. pants tonight,

While perusing mr. pants tonight, I saw a link to Michel Gondry's latest ad for Smirnoff. Pretty much everything I've ever seen from Gondry has been gold, so I immediately clicked on it, but wondered why after a minute or two the video wasn't playing. And then I remembered the phone line coming from the back of my laptop.

I'm on a phone line right now, for the next two weeks until DSL gets installed. It's the first time in a long time, and probably the longest I've had to go on a modem since I first got a broadband connection. I realized tonight that I've had a fast connection at home since late 1997, and downloading large audio or video files has never been anything I thought twice about. It became second nature, and only now do I see a 9Mb file and think "that's at least an hour."

I found it weird that even though the previous tenent left the old DSL gear, and the phone company gave me a new number and turned on phone service in a matter of hours, they required a two-week lag time on getting new DSL self-install equipment to me and reprovisioning the line. Is it any wonder that broadband adoption isn't nearly as widespread as it was predicted, given that it's treated differently than a regular utility? Who wants to wait 2 weeks for something so costly? Why isn't it as easy to get as water, electicity, phone service, and gas?