Robin Petty near Kensington, P.E.I. and Jeremy Pike in Pleasant Bay, Nova Scotia both called Checkup with the same problem: internet providers refusing to service their homes. But their reactions were much different from each other. For Petty, the service was a significant step down and a cause for frustration. Pike, on the other hand, gave up on the internet completely and while he runs a small property rental business in Cape Breton, the lack of internet can actually prove to be a selling point.

Listen to their conversations with Checkup guest host Susan McReynolds.

Susan McReynolds: What is your Internet feed like in P.E.I.?

Robin Petty: Well we're ten minutes north of a town called Kensington in a rural area and I think that we have the lowest high speed internet on the planet.

SM: What is it like at your house?

RP: It's pretty slow compared to when I had high speed fiber-optic internet in Ontario. We have lived here seasonally for about three years and we have had intermittent service—on and off service. We had one summer where we didn't have to pay a bill at all because they kept rebating us. And for three years we paid $46 a month. Compared to the bills in Ontario it was tolerable, but we were just quietly dissatisfied.

And then last summer, when they had fixed all the problems, our rate doubled. They just doubled my bill one month and told us that we had been under a promotion for three years that had miraculously expired.

So the service is now consistent at least. But we're paying double and it's so slow that we can't download movies; we can't stream things; everything is pixelated; our Apple T.V. doesn't work. It's very frustrating. But you know it's one of the joys of living in the country. I was fine paying $46 a month for the crappy service but now that it's double it's maddening.

On top of that, when I told my internet company, Bell Alliance, I was going to be investigating alternatives they told me that they would not be running any new lines to this area. And that if I left I might not be able to come back if I chose to.

Susan McReynolds: What's your internet story?

Jeremy Pike: Well my internet story is that I don't have internet. Initially it wasn't by choice because the service provider just doesn't come this far down the road—I live at the end of a four kilometer dirt road. We've been here for ten years now and at one point we had dial-up but we just eventually got rid of it and now we do without it. When we need it, we travel up the road to another property that has service provided. But for the most part we check emails every three or four days and we let it be known to everybody who wants to contact us that the best way to do it is just by simple landline telephone—as we don't have cell service here either.

SM: Do you feel left out?

JP: No not really because I still have the radio. I buy the paper every day.

I think there needs to be some examination of the difference between 'want' and 'need'. I can certainly sympathize with the people who need the internet to do business—we do that ourselves, we run two small rental properties here within our community. They're seasonal and we take most of our bookings exclusively through e-mail. But I think there's a large portion of the population who sees the internet as a 'need' when it may more fall into the category of 'want' for a lot of their requirements for it.

We find that sometimes guests or inquirers aren't aware that we don't have Internet then we make them aware right away, usually within the first correspondence. But after that when they realize they're not going to get a response in the next five minutes or even the next five hours it's going to take two or three days, then they realize that life still goes on in the meantime.

I think that we've never been so technologically connected. And yet so disconnected on some human levels.