It was a house with high walls, barbed wires and no Internet or telephone connection.
Though Telstra, an Australian telecoms company, is not allowed to refuse anyone a telephone connection, it is using its database to sell additional services to its most costly customers young adults who often move house and want frequent billing cost three times as much as older ones.
But the internet is social connection beyond the telephone, way beyond.
The phone service will only be available to AOL members, who will need to plug a telephone adapter into an existing broadband connection to make calls.
Baker, 39, moved to a larger house with all the amenities, but his experience underscored a simple fact that most city-dwellers ignore: Even in a prosperous country like Britain, hundreds of thousands of people still lack high-speed Internet service, particularly in rural areas, where homes are just too far from telephone exchanges to get a megabit connection.
But even at three miles (5km) from the local telephone exchange, the speed of his broadband connection has inched up over the past few years from 65 kilobytes a second to more than 90 kilobytes a second as the local line has been tweaked and legacy equipment like echo-cancelling coils removed from its junction boxes.
ECONOMIST: The faster the internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
Out of that meager revenue stream Cape.com must meet a payroll for five full-time employees, lease a tangle of telephone lines, including a T-1 upstream connection, and cover its hardware and software expenses.
By contrast, Sprint has invested heavily in technology that can bring fast Internet access and multiple telephone lines to houses and small businesses through a single connection.
His firm has also been chosen as the hub for what BT is claiming as a world first - a 10Gbps connection which is being tested between the Truro telephone exchange and his office.
BBC: When will UK rural areas get fast-speed fibre internet?
Many rural communities are several miles from a telephone exchange - too far for high-speed broadband to work - while satellite connection for high-speed access is very expensive and carries the risk of added technical problems.
The retired Bishop of Derry, Dr Edward Daly, told the Saville Inquiry in a telephone call that he and the Stormont MP, Ivan Cooper, went to the security forces in connection with an unexploded IRA bomb.
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