I live in a housing development of 27 homes built in 2003/2004. Over the past few years, I've had some adventures in getting broadband into the room I use as a home office, because the cable line doesn't come into that room and Comcast offers max speeds 2x or more higher than those offered by Verizon DSL.
I started out with Comcast cable and set up a wireless bridge to connect a router in the office to the cable modem downstairs. But I was having too many problems with signal dropouts and eventually got a 6 megabit DSL line from Speakeasy for about $110 a month.
When Comcast started offering 8 megabit speeds, I decided to try my luck with a BPL bridge (Broadband over Power Line), which is a two-piece thingamabob that you plug into power sockets in two rooms and use your home wiring to transmit the signal. With the Comcast 8 megabit line and some experimenting with the BPL bridges, I ended up getting around the same speeds I was getting from the 6 megabit DSL, but for $50 a month less. So I switched to it.
But all along, I've been reading about and slobbering over FiOS (Fiber Optic Service), which promises blazing speeds (15 megabit downloads, 2 megabit uploads) for around the same price as the 6 megabit cable modem service,
So, a couple of days ago, my heart leapt when I was outside and saw a three Verizon trucks driving in procession through my neighborhood, one carrying a huge cable spool marked "fiber optic". Now, my neighborhood is two private roads, laid out like a P (one long, straight road coming in from a main drag and dead-ending, and one semicircle road that connects to the straight one at both ends). You can't go through our neighborhood to get anywhere else.
So, figuring these trucks were going to stop and do some sort of work, I walked after them, waiting for them to stop so I could ask if this meant they were bringing FiOS to my neighborhood. But they kept going. They came in, made the circuit around, and left. Awwwww!!!!
When I told my wife and some friends about this, they all had the same reaction: "Ice Cream Man!!!!" It hadn't occurred to me that way, but as soon as they said it, I knew how right they were. I'd been following those trucks like a kid chasing after an ice cream truck.
Funny thing is that during the summer, an ice cream vendor comes through our neighborhood every day around 4 p.m. I can hear him through the window from my home office. And I've never once run downstairs to get ice cream or waited for him. But when those Verizon trucks came through the neighborhood... woo hoo!
There has been some Verizon work at a new development down the road, and in the last few days various arrows and markings in blue and white paint have shown up at the entrance to our neighborhood. So I have the funny feeling that the fiber will be laid within the next few weeks. And if it is, I will be the FIRST to call Verizon and demand my FiOS.
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