I am going fiber optic

When we bought our house in this sleepy suburban town, full of subdivisions bordered with gentle rolling hills and grazing cattle, you'd never have thought it as a technology hotbed. Apparently someone thought differently. About a month ago these men drove into our neighborhood with utility trucks (my two-year-old had a blast saying "u-ti-li-li truck") and Ditch Witch trenchers, started digging up trenches and laying down thick strands of optical fibers. Every day we'd get a flyer in the mail proclaiming the next internet revolution (didn't that go out of style along with the dotbust?) . Verizon Fios has arrived.

I had been pretty happy with Comcast high speed internet. Their voluntarily increasing the download speed to 3Mb/s certainly helped. But lately their service had gone to hell. There was a whole week when their DNS servers were down. The whole internet was rendered inaccessible unless you remembered all the IP addresses. Then my router would loose its IP address and DHCP renew would time out again and again and again... Then there were the intermittent quantum anomalies, when you were surfacing the web as usual and suddenly time came to a standstill the electrons all stopped and the link you just clicked on never came back to you. I did a speed test it told me my download speed was 111kb/s and upload was 200kb/s, and promptly asked me "did you tweak you settings since your upload is faster than your download?"

That finally pushed me over the edge. I jumped over to Verizon's Fios' page (well, once the electrons started flowing again) and signed up for the 15Mb/s down 2Mb/s up service at $49.95 a month. You can get a $5 discount if you have Verizon phone services, but my packet8 is $20 a month with free long distance, I don't think Verizon can beat that.

Anyway, I am scheduled to have Fios installed next Tuesday. I can hardly wait.