There are many advantages to working out of the home, but snow days are not one of them.
Normally, the neighborhood cable network is reasonably responsive during the day, because kids and parents are at work. I can get done what I need to do without waiting.
But with six inches of snow on the ground and more falling, schools and many businesses are closed, and apparently many people have headed for the Internet, completely bogging down the cable modem service. It's very pokey, with long waits for simple things like loading a Web page.
And that's a perfect example of why cable and DSL, over the long term, simply don't have what it takes to deliver broadband. If one snow day makes my neighborhood broadband service slow to a crawl, imagine what will happen as more and more users get on and do more and more high bandwidth stuff like Voice over IP and IP television.
We're thirteenth in the world in terms of broadband cacpacity and deployment, behind places like Finland, Norway, and South Korea. And here is where I remind you of my favorite suggestion for a community economic development slogan: "Our town--almost as good as South Korea." It is a pretty sad situation when it comes to that, and it has.