As you may have noticed, posting has been intermittent here since last week late. I alluded to it in the Friday Brief. The problem is one of internet access, or rather lack thereof. It’s a dispute with Wild Blue, the satellite internet provider DirecTV has contracted with, and it has yet to be resolved.

I’m exploring alternatives — including simply heading out to the local Starbucks for an hour each day. I can think of better ways to spend my time but it may come down to this if I can’t work out the dispute with Wild Blue.

The problem essentially is that they’re claiming my usage — which consists solely of running two blogs regularly and a third intermittently, together with some browsing of other blogs, all text-heavy, no movie or music downloads — exceeds “fair use.” So they deliberately slowed down an already abysmally slow connection.

I’m paying over $50 a month for this service, and I find it completely unacceptable that I’m subjected to speeds greatly exceeded even by dialup providers, all because my usage (which is entirely reasonable in my book) is deemed excessive.

I have had no problems with DirecTV itself, but based on this experience, I can’t recommend them for the time being. Until I have some reassurance that either this will stop or they’ll let me out of the contract based on significant misreprsentations as to the level of service I could expect, DirecTV is not on my good side.

What this means for the blog is that we’ll be pushing back our schedule at least a week. I’ll finish up the Twitter series either today or tomorrow (depending on when I can find a few minutes of a reasonable connection rate — otherwise, uploads get interrupted and I lose work). The Twitter ebook will have to be put off for awhile — hopefully no more than a week or so.

Then, next Monday, we’ll start the “Thirty Days to a Better Business Blog for Solos” series.