Fairfield is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. But one thing I envy about Fairfield is your fast broadband. Cities are usually stuck with the monopolies: the phone company and the cable company and they are so stodgy. Some communities in North Carolina were forward thinking and decided that broadband was like a highway, too important to leave up to private interests and laid their own fiber. So the monopolies enlisted their Republican cronies and got a state law making it illegal for cities to do that. So much for the "free market", eh?
The goons running my town are mainly real estate agents and think the "Internets" is their Blackberry. So AT&T laid fiber for U-Verse. When AT&T does that your POTS landline bill goes through the roof because they want you to move to U-Verse. I still wanted a landline so I chose to sign up to U-Verse and save $20 a month over the old POTS line. In some well saturated areas you can't even get a POTS line from them anymore. In the process I also got a promo price for 12 mbps broadband which is twice the speed of what I had (but certainly not as good as Fairfield folks have). I opted for the "self-install" being a techy and everything was supposed to be working for the new U-Verse gateway by 8 PM Friday. It wasn't. That necessitated a call to support which sent out a truck yesterday. According to the tech U-Verse is very fussy about the lines it goes over. He suspected my ancient 3 wire house line but turned out it wasn't the problem. It actually didn't like the very standard two line four wire cable that went from the outside AT&T box to a patch box in the garage near the kitchen. He solved the problem by putting a filter in the AT&T box. He even told me if you want very clean lines CAT 5 cable was a better choice than phone cable. He also said they can't even install U-Verse in some apartment complexes due to the old wiring in them. I wonder if even the Fairfield company's installers run into similar problems. Of course if I wanted faster then I could move to Sebastopol where Sonic broadband set up 1 gbps service. But Fry's wouldn't be handy. ;-)
