I’ve been a RoadRunner/Brighthouse/Spectrum cable internet customer since I moved to Florida back in 2001. In 2004, I commented about Verizon FIOS possibly coming into my area but in 2013 I was still waiting. Thirteen years later, Frontier finally laid fiber in my neighborhood late last year and started offering internet service starting at $30/mo for 500Mbps. My Spectrum service was costing me $115/mo for 600Mbps so it was a no-brainer to upgrade to 1 gig fiber service at $50/mo.
Month: February 2026
Escaping the Pi-Hole for NextDNS
I’ve been running a Pi-Hole ad blocker on my home network (and a remote family network) in one way or another (local install on a RasPi, Docker container on a NAS, etc.) for over 10 years! Of course it only worked when we were at home, so my family had started noticing how cluttered their browsing experience was getting when they were out and about (and would usually complain to me). Then a recent Cox equipment change on the remote family network broke Pi-Hole’s functionality completely by not allowing changes to the default DNS at the router level. Sure I could have hard-coded the Pi-Hole IP address into to every device on the network, but instead I started investigating cloud-based DNS services and decided to give NextDNS a try.