Folks also often ask about wired home internet access in the community, along with cable and satellite TV. Since Time Warner has now taken over the operation of the community's cable system, we can direcly compare things as well as anticipate what's likely to happen in the relatively near future. Currently, members who basically live on the east side of Lake of the Four Seasons ("the big lake") have Verizon phone service....which means they can most probably get DSL high-speed interenet service, which is always address-specific. Our HAH home has DSL, and we've found it to be at least as dependable and speedy as the Road Runner service we had at our home and now at our condo in Hilliard. Cable broadband service can be affected by the number of users along the "line" at any given time....so if we're working on the internet at our condo on a school snow day, we see a slowdown. DSL is not technically affected by the number of subscribers online.
So what's up down the road? Time Warner intends to complete the fiber optic cable rebuild that was (somewhat) started by the previous cable provider (Adelphia)....often referred to in the cable business as a rebuilt of "the plant." That's now projected for 2009. When it's done, Time Warner will be fully in the "bundling" business in Hideaway Hills....meaning, packaging high-speed internet, digital cable TV, and telephone. We have that full Time-Warner Road Runner package in our condo, with the price of all three services in Hilliard costing about what we now pay for DSL and telephone service from Verizon.
And Time Warner will surely price its initial service bundles to significantly undercut what a HAH member might now be paying in total to Verizon and Time Warner. So Verizon would then have to respond, as would AT+T....which maintains telephone service on "the other" side of the big lake. AT+T subscribers are currently limited to dial-up internet service....so AT+T would at the very least be thinking of providing DSL sometime soon. Of course, legal and technical development in the area of non-traditional "cable" TV service delivery will also come into play along the way.
As we always used to say in the broadcasting business, please stay tuned....
(and stay tuned for new tours come spring....these tours are a bit dated now, given changes in appearance throughout Hideaway Hills....lots of volunteer work and updates through 2007!)
©2008, Doug Parker, ikarensell Enterprises Inc. http://www.ikarensell.com
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