Let's just try for a better link

In a Zogby Interactive poll, 28 percent of adults said high-speed Internet was the technology most could not live without. The same poll said 18 percent felt the same way about e-mail.

On Dec. 8, 27,000 customers of Frontier Telecommunications got a taste of that life when a piece of heavy equipment cut the fiber optic cable linking Carson Valley to the rest of North America.

That one hit took out 911 emergency service, telephone connections to the rest of the world, connections to alternative phone services, cell towers in Carson Valley, the high-speed Internet connection and a lot of other high technology we rely on every day.

For the better part of four hours it was back to the old days of Carson Valley when the chief method of communication was to use runners. At least they weren't limited to horseback.

Fortunately, there wasn't much in the way of emergencies during the outage.

But we weren't the only ones left wondering early on if something had happened to the rest of the world, instead of just our Valley.

This is the second time in eight months that we've had this sort of outage. The last time was a switching error.

News that Frontier plans to install a second fiber optic cable to the Valley was welcome. That it will take 18 months makes us nervous. Hopefully, it doesn't mean that we're only two major outages away from a permanent fix.