Internet
If you have moved to the mountains from a suburban or urban area served by cable, you may be extremely surprised to find out that you cannot get high speed internet at your new home. You may have only an extremely long thin copper wire connected to a phone company box some long distance away from your house. DSL in such a situation is basically a joke with such slow speeds that you grow new gray hairs waiting for a page to load.
If you have a cell phone, you may think that you can get a good connection using a 4G data plan. You might test the signal at your new house, find 2 bars of 4G, open a webpage on your phone's browser and think, OK, I can live with this. Only to find out when you move in that the 4G signal was a rare anomaly that only occurs at 2pm on a Thursday, and you really only get 3G, most of the time, and even that drops of to 1X or no data at all. Cell towers do not transmit the same power consistently and local weather can affect the signal as well.
Some people have been able to use satellite for internet and TV, but you need unobstructed line of sight to the satellite, and if your home is in a deep canyon with tall trees good luck with that. Also upload speeds on satellite are much much slower than download speeds. Satellite also has latency issues with VPN connections and cloud cover will also hinder the signal.
Some areas, especially along the main corridors do have Comcast High Speed Internet / Broadband with some folks reporting speeds up to 100 mbps down, so all is not lost. Point to point services such as Etheric are able to provide 25 mpbs bi-directionally - but you must have line of sight to their towers. Surfnet is a local ISP and also an option. Verizon DSL is usually very slow and usually the only DSL option. It all depends on the neighborhood / area.
Struggling to get decent internet is not an issue limited to the Santa Cruz Mountains. Its pretty widespread across the US. Here is a decent article that talks about the choices available for decent internet in a rural setting - it has much of what has been written here.
Phone
If you have a cell phone plan, don't be confused if you try calling the provider (eg Verizon Wireless) and they tell you that they don't serve the area you live in with local phone service. This is because Verizon Residential doesn't talk to Verizon Wireless - it's like they are separate companies. Verizon Wireless will try to sell you local phone service through Comcast/Xfinity, and if there's no cable they will say they can't serve your home. Make sure when going to the Verizon website that you click on Residential to get to the right set of people who can connect you to a regular phone landline and get you phone and DSL.
Also be aware that Verizon (the landline company) is selling it's CA assets to Frontier Communications in 2016. We don't yet know what that means for our local land lines, support, and infrastructure. Here's an article about the sale. Note the 2012 quote from Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam at the end: "it is not sustainable to keep having copper plant out there. You really can't invest in it; it is difficult to maintain."
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