Those of us in the rural areas of Roane County and environs, except the very lucky, must make do with dial-up Internet or, if we have the funds, satellite service from Hughes or WildBlue.

In our house we chose Hughes years ago. We noticed that many less popular sites would give us DNS errors if we hadn't accessed them recently, or sometimes give a very old version of the pages instead of fresh content.

Finally this happened with a couple sites of our own. I had just made version 0.1 of RoaneTrashPickup.com for our excellent garbageman, but could no longer see it! Updating it under those conditions was understandably problematic. Another site with which I assist, www.TNSkyWarn.com/radar.html--a good local radar page, would never show if I typed in the "www" before the domain name, only if I left it off. I wondered how many other smaller sites just appeared down or old to us that we didn't know were really OK to others.

I reluctantly called Hughes support. After some hours of talking and pleading, I waded my way up to someone who understood that not only did my computer have a cache, Hughes did too, and theirs had a problem.

After some days of back-and-forth, finally there is a solution! "TurboPage" must be turned off in the Hughes 7000-series modems in order for customers to see more of those smaller sites.

So, if you go to RoaneTrashPickup.com and don't see the site, or if you get a lot of DNS errors when you go to less traveled sites, try calling Hughes and asking that "TurboPage" be turned off in your modem. You may just see more of the web.

-- OneTahiti