(FORTUNE Magazine) – In this downbeat issue of FORTUNE, you can read one story full of depressing stuff about tech stocks. In another piece, on Comcast, you can read some depressing stuff about broadband. Despite all this doom and gloom, I am not depressed. Here's why.

I've been thinking a lot about broadband recently. Last month, for instance, I was speaking at a conference on the Broadband Home in San Jose. At that very moment, the situation in my broadband home--known here as the Digital Manor--was dire indeed. Both of my DSL lines were down.

My wife, Charlotte, and I first hooked Digital Manor up to a DSL line about two years ago. Our high-speed connection was supplied by Pacific Bell, which--in a flagrant effort to appeal to this columnist--installed the line free, sending six people to do the job, three in suits and three in overalls. That connection worked really well until about two or three months ago. Then it stopped working so well. The way you know a DSL line stops working is that your household computing becomes a crapshoot. My wife or our guests or I would try to use the Internet, and the browser would say it couldn't find the Web page we asked for, so we would try again and wait again. Over time the disruptions became painful--they would last for more than a day. I took to dialing into the mail server at work via my old 56K modem. I even resorted to visiting Starbucks to use its wireless connection to synchronize my e-mail, thus minimizing modem time at home.

The most significant impact of all this is that my wife, one of the cognoscenti herself, has become--how shall I say this?--jaded about broadband. She seems to hold me personally responsible for the DSL outages. She keeps asking me when it will get fixed. Why does she care so much? Because we've gotten so used to a broadband connection that our lives have changed. My computer gets backed up every night; when DSL is out, it doesn't get backed up. With DSL, we use the Net for all kinds of small things. We check the weather when we're about to travel. We check the status of commercial flights when they are in the air, either for each other or for friends who are coming to visit. I check my bank and brokerage accounts frequently to make sure I know what's going on. (Recently I've been thinking that it might be better not to know what's going on in those accounts.) We buy movie tickets on the Web. We get directions. And so on and so forth for hundreds of transactions, all made possible because a fast, persistent connection like DSL is so much easier than the Net via modem. All that doesn't even account for the whole layer of stuff that's simply not feasible at lower speeds: moving big files around on the Internet, uploading digital photographs to Ceiva.com or to photo-sharing sites, downloading music files, and transferring files to and from work easily.

Trying to appease Charlotte, I schemed with our Digital Gardener, Dan Seoane, to install a better and more reliable version of DSL, called SDSL, this time provided by Covad. The result: Neither line works. Somewhere between our house and the Pacific Bell central office, there's a problem on the line that was triggered when we tried to install another line. Now both lines are down, we're desperately missing our fast connection, and Charlotte is peeved.

So where's the good news in all this, you ask? At the broadband panel session in San Jose last month, I was asked why I wanted to invest in broadband. Why? Look at me! I'm an addict! I want my fast connections. I might even double up again and have two DSL lines and a cable modem to make sure we get the service, even when one fails. And look at what's happened in the past four years: According to reasonable estimates, somewhere between eight million and 15 million households in the U.S. have acquired a broadband connection, either DSL or cable. Some people, like Andy Grove, believe that number should be much bigger. But I think it's an amazing number when you consider that it often involves having two different kinds of service people visit your house to make the connection work, after which you pay $40 to $50 per month for ongoing service.

So I'm addicted. And I'll bet you that anyone who has had the experience of using a home network connected to the Internet at a high speed is addicted too. And that's very good news. If you're a company, you like selling to addicts--they're reliable, desperate, price-insensitive customers. And there are so many of us now, that...well, frankly, this is the kind of thing that might start you thinking about bubbles again!

STEWART ALSOP is a partner with New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm. Except as noted, neither he nor his partnership has a financial interest in the companies mentioned. He can be reached at alsop_infotech@fortunemail.com. His column may be bookmarked online at www.fortune.com/technology/alsop.