Being a former network engineer, I'm appalled at myself for not researching the options of plugging in from Duluth. I've just silently accepted the fact that the easiest connect is also very expensive and untrustworthy, and that's life. In other words, I just smile and bend over.

Here's basically how Charter works. They congregate traffic largely by physical location just like they do, well, like they do with TV. By leveraging an existing infrastructure (cable), they can afford to provide a lopsided service at an exorbitant cost to the consumer, and they can do this because they effectively have a miniature monopoly.

At the hardware level, internet traffic is spurious, which is very unlike predictable broadband such as TV broadcasting. Cable, as it turns out, is a kludge when used for packet switching. It never was meant for bandwidth that frequently requires complex routing. So, your 30 Mpbs is a max spike bandwidth, not a guarantee.

A T1 is fast. It's slow fast, as in the tortoise vs. the hare fast. It's fast, because it's an absolute bandwidth, being a dedicated trunk direct to the PSTN. Cable, on the other hand, provides the illusion of fast, because it's a shared trunk over a medium that was designed for broadcast purposes -- push technology, not pull technology such as the web.

In an ongoing effort to re-brand how the cable network appears to the consumer, they even started the On Demand marketing ploy, where it appears that you can ask for a movie or show whenever you want. This isn't so hard to do from the routing perspective so long as everyone doesn't try to do it (pull request) at the same time.

This is where the underlying cable internet problem festers. I like to think of it as the tandem conundrum. You have to pedal in the same gear and cadence your partner does to get from point A to point B. But, in this case, the tandem is not just two people who must agree, it's a few city blocks of people who all have different destinations and want to pedal at their own spin.

Upshot: No one person needs more than 10 Mbps spike traffic to the internet as technology stands today. No one person needs more than 1 Mbps guaranteed minimum bandwidth to the internet. Charter does the extreme (and must do so due to the nature of the underlying medium). It provides a spike of 30, a monthly traffic cap, and promises nothing absolutely.

Side note: the Charter bundle package is, as experienced just recently by a friend of mine, laughable. Charter, for whatever reason, decided to reboot a couple of their routers in her area around 3 a.m. one morning. Well, when that happened, she lost her phone too. One of two things happened. They either do this every once in a while for maintenance and really don't give a crap that somebody might actually be working from home, or the service is really that unreliable and should be expected to go out every once in a while. It wouldn't be so bad, but when it went out, she effectively had no way to communicate with the outside world, because the phone went out too; no way to call support. For what it's worth, though, if this ever happens to you, Charter is good at doling out credits for service problems. So, make sure you mention "reimbursement" if you find yourself on the line with their tech support.

Touche. There is no shielding with wireless. But you should know that the power to bandwidth ratio is incredibly small. You are, after all, not trying to defrost a chicken. The actual frequency becomes insignificant with the amount of watts being used.

Is the power usage for wifi heavy for a portable device. Absolutely yes. If you want to prolong your laptop battery (or smartphone/table for that matter), disable wifi on it while not using the connection. But, the physical effects on a human organism only becomes apparent at close distances (like millimeters). To put it into perspective, your GPS that communicates directly with satellites floating thousands of miles above your head (also operating on really low power) have no ill effects on you whatsoever.

You have much more exposure to a powerful EMF for a minute near the substation on Michigan St. west of downtown than you do a lifetime of using wireless in close proximity.

On the microwave note, though, microwave ovens do emit radiation even with their shielding. The field only goes about a cm out from the box on modern ovens, though.

Repeaters lessen the power required; a bunch of small transmitters instead of a giant KBJR/KDLH/NBC/CBR/whatever antenna. I learned this (unfortunately) working with accounting databases.

It's obvious where I'm going with this. It's a socialistic idea but fits the paradigm, especially for a place like Duluth. It's a good wager; meaning that there's little cost and chance for failure/embarrassment with a possible big reward.

Back to engineering/tin hat. You wouldn't need it. You are already surrounded by wireless. The thing is, you just can't use it on a broad playground. We have a fiefdoms competing for air share that shouldn't be at war.