Background: I used to live in the northern Virginia area, hub of the internets. I had an old AOL account and was part of their beta test of DSL service, it put the A in ADSL with a 1.5Mbps/64Kbps line. Whoever wired the house back in the 70's did it wrong as we had 3 pair (!) for all our jacks and only the first pair was wired right. So I went through all the jacks and made sure pair 2 was consistent and pair 3 was as well, though we only had 2 pair comin' into the house. Once I got that all fixed up, DSL worked great except when it rained. All our cables are underground and I guess somewhere there was a leak. The packet loss was just massive, enough that browsing the web was difficult and this with late 90's lightweight websites. Later on AOL discontinued the beta test and I got 1.1 Mbps SDSL through work. Same phone line issues, of course. I even convinced my dad to run CAT5 through the house as a whole-house network, plannin' fer the future.
Ok, so just establishing the broadband and telco stuff I was messin' around with back in the day. I had a vested interest in networking junk in that house. Fast forward to the 2000's. I moved out and then Verizon said, "oh hey let's deploy FiOS to your parents now that you're gone!" Oh man oh man did I try to convince them to get that instead of their AOL dialup, visions of running Quake 2 servers dancing in my head. Nope. They figured they'd get cable. Why? Because they didn't get great cell phone reception where we live, cell phones I might note that sit in their cars turned off "in case we need them." And with regular phone lines, if the power went out they had old phones that would still ring via the voltage in a phone line. FiOS, you see, would require ripping out the phone lines and installing a new box with a UPS that converted the fiber into regular phone signals. So if the power went out and was out for over 5 hours (or whatever), they might not be able to make calls in case of DISASTER.
A lost cause. So a few years later they ended up getting cable.
Fast forward to last week. Last week I visited them and it was raining. I waxed nostalgic about how I had to mess with rewiring the phone jacks and how the rain messed up the DSL signals. They looked at me odd and said, well, yeah, we heard that Verizon wasn't really fixing or maintaining their copper stuff anymore so we switched to FiOS. WHAT. Oh yes, didn't you see the cement access panel in the front yard? YOU HAVE FIBER INTERNET AND YOU DIDN'T TELL ME?!?
...and this is where my soul broke:
No, we have cable internet, they said. Wait... what... you... fiber... why...
"Oh, well, Verizon keeps asking us to get internet with them, but it's a little more expensive than the cable so we figure it's not worth it."
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
