FIOS
Arthur, owner of two chocolate labs – Cooper named after Cooperstown and Abner named after Abner Doubleday – and father of sixteen month old, Shea – not named after Shea Stadium, just left after spending the morning here installing Verizon FIOS or fibre optic cable. Now I’m as fast as La Rad at 15 mbps down and 2 mbps up.
Cool! Welcome to the fast lane. Enjoy!
Comment by charlie — January 31, 2006 @ 1:54 pm
And Charlie when he’s home.
Comment by michael — January 31, 2006 @ 3:03 pm
Doesn’t it just rock. So you went for the 15 and not the 5. Wise move. Should you lose phone service (we lost it twice) it was a matter of one facet of Verizon telling another that we now had fiber optics and not copper.
Comment by La Rad — January 31, 2006 @ 4:42 pm
Verizon (or somebody) is putting in fiber optics cables in neighborhoods near us, but we haven’t seen any workers digging on our street. They’ll probably get around to us after we’ve moved to Colorado. The fast lane still eludes us.
Comment by rakkity — January 31, 2006 @ 5:57 pm
And out here at Torroemore, they finally did whatever needed to be done to pipe digital TV in with our DSL. Minor progress, I know, but some is surely better than none at all. Have fun with your major step forward.
Comment by FierceBaby — January 31, 2006 @ 6:56 pm
No telephone poles in Bowie? Around here those lines to the house are called “drops.” I learned that today. The best thing – not Verizon’s monopoly – is the cost for 15 times the speed is only four dollars more.
Digital TV has to be a huge improvement!
Comment by michael — January 31, 2006 @ 7:36 pm
No telephone poles in Bowie town. But that doesn’t mean good service. In our case, we consider ourselves lucky if the telephone calls can be understood by one person at either end of the line.
I just found the info about optical feeds being laid around town.
http://www.cityofbowie.org/news/verizon_updateoct05.htm
Our street won’t be done until next year, when we’ll be long gone to the Rocky Mountains.
As for improving TV, Mike–do you even watch TV? As I recall, you quit several years ago. Until recently, Mrs rakkity & I used to watch old Seinfeld re-runs, and that was our 3 hours of TV per week. Then we got some DVDs of MASH, and now we watch 0 hours of TV per week.
However, I may turn the tube on for the Olympics.
Comment by rakkity — February 1, 2006 @ 5:57 pm
No, we don’t watch TV. Now, I’m not at all high and mighty about it , in fact, after several years went by and I could no longer participate in any television related discussion, I felt the loss. However, now that I’ve been away so long it is very hard to go back at all. Especially with my innately angry, disappointed and cynical personality. The Olympics? I’d just pick on the nationalistic bent and all the interrupting commercials.
But guess what. I bopped over to the Apple site and downloaded, in seven minutes, a 200MB trailer for some future extreme skiing movie.
Long gone? Do you have a moving date?
Comment by michael — February 1, 2006 @ 6:10 pm
Moving date? Imponderables like selling our house, buying another and getting a mortgage make it hard to set one. But we’ve already subscribed to the Boulder Daily Camera, so we feel like we’re on our way.
While watching the Olympics, you’d be griping about the nationalistic fervor or commercials and I’d be griping about the absent shots of Nordic events, the excessive presentations of skating, and the endless replays of downhill crashes.
And how about the Super Bowl? Beth and I are already figuring out which nearly empty restaurant to go to this Sunday.
Comment by rakkity — February 2, 2006 @ 9:29 am