(FORTUNE Magazine) – Jealousy runs rampant in my broadband heart. Someone has faster Internet access than I do. And this feeling is only getting worse.

Until a few weeks ago I was pretty satisfied that what I had when it came to broadband was as good as you could get. Faithful readers will remember that the Digital Manor is connected to the Internet by means of DSL, which usually affords us a reasonably quick, always-on connection. "Usually" and "reasonably" are the key words in that sentence. Sometimes our DSL connection, provided to us by SBC, acts like a spoiled dog, fetching web pages and e-mail only when it feels like it. I even once tried plugging in a modem and dialing up to see if I could get a faster connection. I could. But when the DSL was working right, it felt really fast.

Now my connection feels just fast enough--maybe. It has long been a fact of life in the computer business that whatever performance has just been achieved by your equipment will feel inadequate within three to six months of your shelling out cash for that equipment. That feeling usually hits at the exact moment you hear from a friend about the great new PC he just bought. And since everyone in the Valley is obsessed with computers, the time frame has always tended to be even faster here. It is infuriating, sure, but it is also a sign that the market was robust and speeding ahead.

This inadequacy window never used to apply to broadband: Sure, you might get frustrated about your connection, but for years there's been no feeling that anyone had it any better. The market meltdown, surplus capacity, and the crushing of hungry new broadband upstarts by the phone and cable monopolies have made broadband feel like the technology that time forgot. At the Digital Manor we've had DSL since 1999. What else was there?

Now my eye is starting to wander.

Perhaps the biggest change in broadband is that most people now agree that cable is better than phone lines as a way to connect homes to the Internet. The computer industry hotly debated the issue for years. Since I had DSL, I tended to believe that it didn't matter which connection you had. Okay, I'll admit it: I thought that the phone companies might be better at technology and customer service than the cable companies. I was wrong.

Cable is still consistently less expensive than DSL and the fact that it's not as fast sending data as retrieving it, as well as that you have to share your pipe with your neighbors, hasn't made a difference to consumers. Over the past four years more people have signed up for cable Internet than DSL; now nearly two-thirds of the nearly 20 million broadband-connected homes use cable to surf. I never like being in the minority when it comes to technology.

Recently my brother hooked up cable Internet to the Digital Ranch, our house in Santa Fe. When my wife, Charlotte, and I visited Santa Fe over the Memorial Day weekend, I discovered that the Internet connection at the ranch was faster than at the manor here in California. In other words, not only am I in the minority of broadband customers who depend on DSL, but I also can experience what I'm missing just by taking a vacation at my own house in the country!

Even so, I may eventually be vindicated in my early belief in the phone companies. Verizon, for one, seems to have awakened to the fact that the cable companies might win the race and maybe even steal some of its basic telephone business. Now it is starting to fight back.

Recently the company announced plans to bring fiber-optic connections to some homes in 2004. Telecom and tech pundits have argued for years that there was no way economically to string fiber-optic lines all the way to every home in a neighborhood. Some people are working on wireless alternatives to DSL or cable and some people are working on various ways to make DSL or cable go faster, but the plain physical truth is that the best way currently to carry a lot of data and send it over long distances is through fiber.

If you work in an office, it's likely that you use a fiber-based Internet connection. Those of us who use fiber know that that kind of broadband really screams compared with either DSL or cable; heck, it feels as if you could even watch movies on a fiber connection to the Internet. I had figured that telecom companies like Verizon had too much trouble raising capital even to think about Fiber to the Home (yes, the industry has actually adopted FTTH as an acronym). No matter. Even a formerly monopolistic phone company can recognize a competitive challenge when it realizes it is being beaten.

So here I am at Digital Manor using DSL, which is sometimes so slow that I'm reminded of the Old Days, when we used to endure the whistling and squawking of a modem to get to the Internet. Meanwhile, twice as many people are using cable connections to the Internet, including myself at the Digital Ranch. And an East Coast telecom company is going to begin equipping homes with fiber connections to the Internet.

Those are all good signs that broadband is starting to get its groove on. But it's a hassle for me. Do I have to move east and become a Verizon customer to maintain parity in the broadband world?

Perhaps I'll ask Charlotte whether we can get a cable modem here at the Digital Manor first.