It is a monopoly. Embarq, formerly known as Sprint, as mentioned above has the only phone service in this area. John R is correct that MediaCom offers phone service in their package, but they use Embarq as the provider. While I am not 100% certain, I believe MediaCom is the cable provider in Seacrest, and as noted Embarq would be the only phone company for DSL.
Want it be great in a few more years when we can all have high speed internet service via cell towers through our ... wait a minute. You can! I know that Alltel has the smart phones such as Blackberry, which you can use as your internet modem, for a fee of course, anywhere you can receive a cellular signal. I believe the monthly charge is around $60++ on top of your regular Blackberry/Alltel account. There are other smart phones which Alltel carries outside of the Blackberry line, which will save you about $8-$12 per month by not having to go through Blackberry's service. Note, when online via the smart phone, you cannot use that particular phone for calls. However, you can opt for a second phone at an additional fee, which would allow you to make cell phone calls while online. Yes, this would allow you to plug your laptop/desktop/tablet pc into the smart phone and have unlimited internet service.
Truly not a bad price, especially for people who cannot have highspeed access due to location. As it is, the price is not much higher than being wired in at the moment, and as more consumers move away from land lines and move toward smart phones, I think we will see a big push to this service and the monopoly phone and cable companies will become dead industries. They are busy screwing themselves right now and the gov't is helping them do it.
