You can’t make a call or send a text on your cell phone in Green Bank, West Virginia. Wireless Internet is outlawed, as is Bluetooth. As you approach the tiny town on a two-lane road that snakes through the Allegheny Mountains, the bars on your cell phone fall like dominoes, and the scan function on the radio ceases to work. The rusted pay phone on the north side of town is the only way for a visitor to reach the rest of the world. It’s a premodern place by design,
devoid of the gadgets and technologies that define life today.
The reason for the town’s empty airwaves is visible the moment you arrive. It’s the Robert C. Byrd telescope, aka the GBT, a gleaming white, 485-foot-tall behemoth of a dish. It’s the largest of its kind in the world and one of nine in Green Bank, all of them government owned and operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).
Published by Reader’s Digest. See more at: http://www.rd.com/culture/town-without-wifi/