When people in the rural and northern parts of Suffolk talk about the downtown area, they often wind up complaining about the perks that downtown businesses and residents get that they don’t share — things like trash pickup multiple times a week, nearby fire and rescue services and the like.

One thing many of those folks probably don’t realize is that they’re a generation or two ahead of downtown in terms of the media that’s available to them. Just 5 percent of the businesses and residents occupying spaces downtown have Charter Communications cable, Internet or telephone service.

That’s not because they all love satellite television, or even because they’re hot on all the new stations they can get with their government-subsidized digital television converter boxes. They don’t eschew fast cable Internet service out of a fondness for the “modem song” played by those old dial-up telephone modems.


Suffolk News-Herald | Charter?s special, secret number