I can still remember bringing home and hooking up my 56k modem, and the excitement of the boost to speed it would bring to my dial-up net surfing.
Then, back in 1999 we signed up with Jones @Home, and our Internet started coming in along with the cable TV. And it was good.
And then Jones became Comcast, and one spring day in XXXX we went looking for WGN to catch a Cubs game, and we found that Comcast had dropped WGN in favor of The Food Network. And it was bad.
So we set out to pull our television down out of the air, like our grandfathers had done before us, but not with some spindly aerial antenna working below the clouds, but with a sleek satellite dish, pulling our programs from space. We found we had made a mistake going with the Dish Network, as there were more sports to be found on DirectTV, and so after a year with Dish, we switched. We bought the baseball package and the football package, and it was good.
But then last year we bought our first HD capable TV, and then another. I ordered an HD upgrade from DirectTV, and the installer came to our house, took a look at the sky, and said basically, “No HD for you”. Seems we still have too many trees around here, what a nusiance.
Then, late last summer, our neighborhood’s streets were being torn up, with painted lines and little orange flags. Verizon was laying fiber-optic cable, and soon we’d have a new option, FiOS.
Today was the day, and now our phone (unlimited local & long distance), television (HD, DVR, Movies on Demand), and Internet (15 mps down, 5 up) are all coming in a single bundle, for less money than I’ve been paying Comcast/DirecTV/Sprint for the same, and a 19-inch HD TV was thrown into the mix. And it is good.