Americans in Brazil

Time Magazine had an article entitled "Soylandia," covering Brazil's huge growth in soy production. The Mayor of a frontier farm town in Brazil had this to say:

"They come down here and start missing their cable TV and their Internet, and they don't come back."

That seems to be true. Americans all over Central America and the Caribbean go to huge lengths to maintain a link with US television, sometimes using satellite dishes that are 3-5 meters in diameter to pull in the weak edges of the signal beamed at the 48 states. There are entire online forums devoted to that very subject. On the South American continent the northern coastal areas of Colombia and Venezuela can just barely receive the faint signals with very big dishes. In Brazil - not so much.

It's an incredible culture shock going from having 300 channels and 4 megs of internet bandwidth to having 3 snowy channels and dialup that doesn't really perform much better than 19.2 kbps if at all due to the quality of the lines.

I've lived it. November 2002 I'm living the connected life in Bloomington, MN. December 2002 we've crossed the equator into disconnected nothingness. For a few weeks its ok but then you start jonesing - bad.

Planning on escaping to South America and making a local salary? Plan on spending 1/6 of your income on TV and and whatever internet bandwidth you can get.

Oh, and from Uruguay the way that USED to work (and may still) to get a glimpse of ABC, CBS and NBC was to get a DirecTV Latin America box activated in Puerto Rico. The same receiving dish provided by DirecTV Uruguay aims at the same satellite and the Puerto Rican box would still receive those US channels live. As of 2005 this worked, but the DirecTV Latin America folks are a secretive lot and it may not any longer.

Besides the way to get your US TV fix from anywhere with a good internet connection is Slingbox. I have an Uruguayan friend who has a dedicated US DirecTV receiver in my home connected to a Slingbox that only he uses - and that thing is keeping my internet connection busy more often than not.