Where Challenges and Benefits Differ

There is a great divide in Australia between the country and the city.

Many in the City live with a romantic perception of the great outdoors and rolling plains stocked with grazing sheep, cattle or growing something valuable.

 

There are many stories of City dwellers buying a property to retire too, only to sell up 3 or so years later.

Conversely, those who make their living on the land or live in rural towns would not swap what they do for any other life, however it is hard work and there are no public holidays.

Rural residents are challenged by way of a basic lack of medical and associated services, poor roads, outdated communication infrastructure and struggling schools, among other things.

This is countered by the benefits of considerably cheaper housing and the ability to save money by producing a great deal of food on your own land.

Us in the big cities are faced with ever rising property prices, food costs, increasingly clogged roads and crowded often unreliable public transport.

I have been internet challenged today.

I consider a fast on demand internet to be normal. Most of us in major Cities do. I had no desire for an NBN connection however when there was no choice, this only made my internet access faster and more reliable. I can stream, upload, download, dropbox, record, edit, format or whatever else without really giving a thought to how much data has been consumed.

The property I am looking after does not have normal internet services. It could have, and connection costs and plan costs are the same as for Melbourne, Brisbane etc. The difference however, is the property owner has to fund the infrastructure for the nearly one kilometre from the road to the residence which amounts to an extraordinary number of thousands of dollars.

Being aware of the connectivity limitations ahead of me, I beefed up my mobile wireless service and all was fine until last night when it didn’t work.

Not to worry, I would talk to Telstra/BigPond in the morning and if need be, escalate to my very own Telstra Business Consultant.

I wont bore you except to say after many hours on hold to 3 separete Telstra/BigPond areas and multiple e-mails to “my business guy”, I was advised to visit my local Telstra store.

 
Easy, except it was a one hour drive away, followed by a 75 minute wait before I could see someone and then a one hour return trip.

I have to say, the face to face service I eventually received was excellent, beyond excellent even and my issue was resolved in about 15 minutes.

This minor event highlighted once again that the sum total of the challenges faced in City Centres and Rural communities are essentially the same, it is just the individual events that benefit and also challenge each sector are different.

 

Ultimately, I suspect over time, the pros and cons of each cancel each other out and it is purely a matter of individual preference.

As detailed daily rainfall records must be maintained, I am off to check the rain gauge