I'm dreaming of a broadband Christmas. This year, that dream is finally coming true. Adelphia is coming through on promises made earlier in the year to bring high-speed Internet access to most homes in Temecula. It really warmed my chestnuts a few months ago to see Adelphia breaking up sidewalks in our housing tract for sorely needed upgrades to Temecula's antiquated cable infrastructure.

Although wireless broadband has been available to large areas of Temecula, our one-story home on the outskirts of the city made any kind of high-speed Internet access somewhere between difficult and impossible to obtain.

In a previous column, I predicted that Adelphia would win the broadband race to my door, since Verizon claimed it had no plans to upgrade its system to provide Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) access to customers currently beyond the range of its dilapidated switching equipment.

Competition works in mysterious ways. Adelphia didn't begin upgrading its cable system until it lost a significant number of frustrated customers who switched to satellite service to receive the multiple channels our local cable company didn't provide for too many years. The value of true digital cable, along with high-speed Internet access, is beginning to lure a number of those customers back to Adelphia.

I was all set to be one of those lured customers until I responded to yet another DSL ad from Verizon, expecting the usual carol of rejection that I was too far away from the company's switching station. Verizon surprisingly sang a different tune, now that it has competition, and said that DSL is suddenly available to my humble abode.

There haven't been any recent earthquakes to shake our house within range of Verizon's equipment, and I am relatively certain the company hasn't invested a dime in improving the telephone infrastructure, so I can only assume that competition somehow made the impossible possible.

Perhaps Verizon has hired Harry Potter to magically upgrade its telephone system, but I'm still a bit skeptical. I enjoy an occasional game of poker, so I couldn't resist calling Verizon's bluff and ordering its elusive DSL service.My modem should arrive any day, but I have heard previous stories of customers receiving their modems only to find out that service really isn't available and then having to mail back their modems.

I am old enough to remember the business model of yesteryear that strived to keep the customer satisfied. These days, it seems businesses have decided it's more fun to play ping-pong with customers. We have been swindled by deregulation and cornered by corporate America. Consumers are just the pawns on this chessboard of service, supply and demand.

The game pieces accumulate in our homes, from the first, second and third cell phones we ever owned, to the disconnected dishes hanging from the eaves of our homes. We like to think we are players with choices, but all the while, it is the consumers who are being played.

The reindeer play their reindeer games as a new year of hopes and dreams approaches. This Christmas season, as families gather around the yuletide fire, I will be hopefully fidgeting behind my computer, hooking up a high-speed wire.

Paul Jacobs of Temecula is a regular columnist for The Californian. E-mail: TemeculaPaul@aol.com