Helpful guides
Free, plain-English help — whether or not you call us.
Long Beach · Los Angeles County
Onsite and remote tech support across Long Beach — Downtown, Belmont Shore, Naples, Bixby Knolls, and the CSULB area.
Long Beach is California's seventh-largest city — a port, aerospace, college, and beach town rolled into one, and the tech needs follow. The Port of Long Beach, with the neighboring Port of Los Angeles, forms the busiest container-port complex in the Americas (together they handle roughly 40% of all U.S. container imports), anchoring a big logistics and import small-business base that leans on us for networks, POS, and cameras. The city has also reemerged as "Space Beach": Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, and Vast now build rockets and spacecraft here — on the bones of the old Douglas Aircraft plant by the airport that turned out warplanes and, until the last C-17 rolled off in 2015, jetliners — so a growing base of aerospace and engineering pros need high-end home offices, CAD/simulation workstations, NAS storage, and secure remote access. Cal State Long Beach, now at a record 42,000-plus students (the CSU system's second-largest campus), brings a steady stream of student and faculty laptop, printer, and Wi-Fi calls. Housing runs from historic Craftsman homes and dense 1920s apartments downtown and in Alamitos Beach — old wiring and crowded airwaves make for weak Wi-Fi — out to the Naples canals and Belmont Shore on the water. Fiber is ordinary here in a way it still is not across much of Los Angeles County, and that is an accident of telephone history: most of Long Beach's phone network belonged to GTE rather than Pacific Bell. Verizon's own corporate history traces GTE back to a Long Beach telephone company its founders bought in the 1920s — Associated Telephone Utilities Co. was organized in 1926 to hold the California and Wisconsin properties, came out of Depression-era receivership as General Telephone in 1935, became General Telephone & Electronics in 1959, and merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon in 2000. Verizon built FiOS out over those lines, which is why so many Long Beach homes have real fiber to the house. The wire has changed hands twice since: Frontier bought Verizon's California, Texas, and Florida wireline business on April 1, 2016, and then Verizon bought Frontier back — the $20 billion deal closed January 20, 2026, five days after the last California approval, and the service now goes by "Frontier, a Verizon company." Frontier's own merger notice says the plan, the equipment, the MyFrontier app, and the separate Frontier bill all carry on as they are, and that anything else will be announced in advance — worth knowing, because a corporate handover is exactly when a convincing "confirm your account before your service moves" email turns up. Sign in from the app or an address you typed yourself, never from the link. The day-to-day side of fiber is more mundane: the box the line terminates on is an ONT, it belongs to the provider, and the installer puts it wherever the fiber reaches the building — the garage, a side wall, a utility closet — with the router parked next to it. That is why plenty of Long Beach homes measure full speed at the wall and still drop out in a back bedroom or an upstairs office. The fix is moving or extending the router, not the fiber. There is a second reason that garage matters here, and it is the strangest piece of infrastructure history in any city we cover: the ground under Long Beach moved. Oil and gas production from the Wilmington Oil Field dropped the pressure in the sands below and let the weight of everything above compact them, and the city's own account of the result is blunt. Subsidence began in the 1940s; the land sank more than four feet by 1945; by 1951 the rate exceeded two feet per year; and total subsidence reached 29 feet at the center of what the city calls the Subsidence Bowl, over more than 20 square miles along the shoreline from the Port to Seal Beach. Pumping water back down to repressure the formations stopped it — by 1966 it had stabilized and in places rebounded by as much as two feet — and the city's oil program still counts subsidence control among the things it manages today. What that leaves behind is a large, flat, densely built stretch of city sitting very low against the water. Long Beach Public Works keeps a flood-zone page for that reason, pointing residents at FEMA's flood insurance rate maps and, in a hazard area, at a base flood elevation a building has to be raised above, and its advice to households is the sensible ordinary list: move essential items and furniture to the upper floors, fit backwater valves, keep sandbags and plastic sheeting handy, and elevate or relocate electrical panel boxes, furnaces, water heaters, and washers and dryers. Read that last item next to the paragraph above and the gap is obvious. The city tells you to get the appliances up off the garage floor; nobody tells you that the ONT, the router, the power strip they share, and in most houses we visit the external backup drive are down there too, on the same slab, because that is where the fiber came in. Street flooding here is not hypothetical — Naples streets have gone deep enough after storms to make the local news — and water does not have to get far up the wall to take out a household's internet, its phone service if that runs over the same line, and its only copy of twenty years of photographs in one go. So on the low side of town a lot of our work is unglamorous: get the gear off the floor. The ONT itself usually cannot move, because it belongs to the provider and it is where the fiber terminates, but the router can be relocated into the house on a single cable run — the same job that fixes the dead back bedroom anyway. Everything else that lifts goes on a wall plate or a high shelf, power strips included. The backup drive should not be in the garage at all: it belongs inside, with a second copy off-site, because a flood, a fire, and a burglary each take the garage and the house together. Salt air is the slow version of the same problem, since the low, damp, unconditioned space that floods is also the one that corrodes connectors and drive housings, which is why gear near the water here ages faster than the same equipment two miles inland. The seawalls are the public half of it — the walls around Naples and Alamitos Bay belong to the city rather than to the homeowners, and they have been rebuilt in phases with Tidelands money since a 2009 evaluation found them in significant disrepair, Phase 2 alone driving 2,148 linear feet of new steel sheet-pile wall, with new storm drains and sidewalks, against $9.2 million reserved in Tidelands funding — and on the ocean side the city pushes up a sand berm along the Peninsula for the winter. None of that is a homeowner's decision. Where the modem sits is. There is a calendar behind all of this, and it is the part that usually goes unsaid. The highest water of the year is neither random nor a surprise: the California King Tides Project, run by the state Coastal Commission, publishes the dates well in advance, and the highest predicted tides of the year fall on November 24-26 and December 23-25 in 2026, and on January 21-22 in 2027. A king tide on its own is just a very high tide. What matters is one of those windows landing on the same weekend as a winter storm and a big south swell, and that is the combination the city writes its advisories around — high tides, large swells, and the potential for localized flooding near low-lying areas, with residents in flood-prone spots told to stay vigilant and be prepared in the event of an evacuation. The city's own preparation runs on the same clock. Long Beach builds and fortifies protective sand berms along the oceanfront Peninsula and in the area of Fifth and Ninth Place in Alamitos Beach, checks that its pump stations and seawall plugs are working, puts debris booms out on the Los Angeles River and at Rainbow Harbor, and opens sandbag distribution at the lifeguard station at 72nd Place and Ocean Boulevard and at fire stations around the city — and it asks people to stay off the berms and well away from the machinery working the sand. Every one of those is a seasonal job, done ahead of the weather, by people who know which weekend the water is coming. That clock is the one piece a household never sets. The lifting job described above — the router off the ONT and into the house on a single cable run, the power strip and equipment up onto a wall plate, the backup drive indoors with a second copy off-site — is a comfortable hour on a dry Tuesday in September, and a poor thing to attempt with a warning posted and water already across the slab. On the Peninsula, in Naples, on the bay side of Belmont Shore, and in the low blocks of Alamitos Beach, the honest deadline is the first king-tide window in late November, which makes this September and October work rather than January work. There is one more thing that shapes the work here, and unlike everything above it has nothing to do with water. On November 14, 2023, the City of Long Beach learned it was the subject of a network security incident. The response was fast and unusually public: the city's Department of Technology and Innovation notified the FBI and brought in outside cybersecurity professionals, systems were pulled offline within days, and on November 17 the City Council voted 8-0 in a special meeting to ratify the City Manager's proclamation of a local emergency — declared over a computer network, with the City Manager's purchase authority raised to $1 million and the emergency running through the Thanksgiving weekend to December 5. The main website and most systems came back on November 27, and utility billing and payment processing, taken down in the same first week, were not restored until December 5. Then it went quiet for a long time. The city's own update in October 2024 was still describing the work of identifying whose personal information sat in the affected files as "incredibly detailed, time-intensive" and ongoing. The investigation concluded on March 18, 2025, and the city began mailing notification letters on April 14, 2025 — seventeen months after the incident. The California Attorney General's public breach list records it in exactly that shape: The City of Long Beach, CA, breach date 11/14/2023, reported 04/14/2025. What was in those files is the part that matters at a kitchen table. The city's own disclosure lists names in combination with one or more of date of birth, financial account information, credit and debit card information, Social Security number, biometric information, medical diagnosis and treatment information, medical provider and health insurance information, driver's license number, passport number, medical record number, taxpayer identification number, and patient account information — while making clear that the mix varied by person and that not every element was involved for everyone. None of that is a password, and that distinction is the one we spend the most time explaining here, because it changes what "do something about it" means. A password takes a minute to change. A date of birth, a Social Security number, a passport number and a fingerprint do not change at all, so the defense is not a new password but a security freeze on the credit file at all three bureaus — free, lasting until you lift it, and only ever in the way when you actually apply for credit. The part of that we get called about is the boring half, and the standard advice about it has gone out of date: the freeze is no longer a PIN mailed to you and lost in a drawer, it is an online account at each bureau. Experian's own page now says you no longer need a PIN and only need a free Experian account to manage the freeze; Equifax has you manage it with a username and password after creating an account. So what a household is really left holding is three new logins at three credit bureaus, wanted in a hurry years later at a car dealership or in the middle of a mortgage. They belong in a password manager, with a recovery email and a second factor the household will still control. The second half of this is still live now, and it is a scam rule with a date attached. The city said from the beginning that it would notify people by U.S. mail, to the last known home address it had on file. It also ran a dedicated toll-free response line — and that line operated from April 14 to July 15, 2025 and is closed, the 90-day notification period is complete, and the city's own page states that no further updates are anticipated. Put those together and the rule falls out on its own: nobody is going to telephone, email or text you now on behalf of the City of Long Beach about this. Anyone who does — offering to check whether you were affected, to enroll you in the credit monitoring, to process a claim or a settlement, to "verify" your Social Security number so they can look you up — is running an old play on top of a real event, which is exactly what makes it convincing. The Federal Trade Commission tells breached organizations to do what Long Beach did, and says why in its own guidance: "if you'll only contact consumers by mail, then say so. If you won't ever call them about the breach, then let them know. This information may help victims avoid phishing scams tied to the breach." And if you moved between 2023 and 2025, or you were renting, or the address the city had for you was an old one, that letter may never have found you. That is not a dead end — the city published the same disclosure on a public page at longbeach.gov/networksecurityincident precisely so that it is available to anyone who believes they should have received a letter and did not, and the frequently asked questions are posted in English, Spanish, Khmer and Tagalog. It is worth knowing this reached small businesses and not only households: a license, a permit, a vendor payment or an ambulance bill all put records into city systems, "taxpayer identification number" and "financial account information" are both on the city's own list, and for a sole proprietor that taxpayer number is often simply the Social Security number. The wider reason any of this belongs on a page about tech support is that it is what a breach at an organization you never chose to be a customer of looks like from the outside: you find out a year and a half later, by post, from a body that has already stopped answering the phone about it, and nothing you do to your own laptop prevents it. What you can control is the standing state of things — a freeze on the credit file, two-factor turned on for the bank and for the email account that can reset everything else, statements actually read rather than filed, and a rule agreed in the household before anyone is on the phone: an unexpected caller who already knows a lot about you gets hung up on and called back on a number you looked up yourself.
Where we drive in Long Beach.
If you're near these, you're in our area.
We're independent — we'll work with whichever provider you have, and tell you the truth about whether switching is worth it.
We're independent — we'll work with whatever you buy. We service desktop and tower computers and swap out parts — drives, RAM, power supplies, graphics cards. Laptop repairs are more limited, since many parts are soldered in. We don't repair phones or tablets, so the shops below are where we send those — along with the closest places to buy gear.
Shopping online? For most parts and peripherals — drives, RAM, cables, webcams, routers — we recommend Amazon or Newegg. Tell us your setup and we'll send exact links so you don't overpay or buy the wrong thing.
From real Long Beach jobs we've done — what's actually worth buying for the kinds of homes and businesses we see here.
CAD-workstation, NAS, and secure-remote setup for a "Space Beach" aerospace engineer working from home
Pre-Grand-Prix POS, guest-Wi-Fi, and camera setup for a downtown Pine Ave restaurant
Network and POS setup for an import small business near the port
Mesh Wi-Fi in a 1920s Alamitos Beach apartment
Moving a router off the fiber ONT in a Belmont Shore garage so the upstairs office finally had signal
Wall-mounting the router and power strip and moving the backup drive indoors for a Naples house whose gear sat on the garage slab
October storm-season check on a Peninsula home — router moved off the garage ONT into the house, gear lifted onto a wall plate, and off-site backup turned on before the first king tide
Setting up a password manager for a retired Bixby Knolls couple after a breach-notification letter, so their three credit-bureau logins and account recovery details were somewhere they could find them
Free, plain-English help — whether or not you call us.
Onsite and remote — we come to you.
Often yes — call before noon for best chance of a same-day appointment. Otherwise we schedule next-day.
Yes — high-end workstations, CAD/simulation performance, big NAS/RAID storage, and secure remote access for Long Beach's "Space Beach" aerospace and engineering crowd are a growing call.
Yes — ahead of the April Grand Prix we get downtown restaurants, bars, and shops set with reliable POS, separate guest Wi-Fi, and cameras that hold up through the crowds and street closures.
Usually yes. Downtown and Alamitos Beach buildings have thick old walls and crowded airwaves; we fix placement and channels or add a small mesh, no rewiring needed.
Yes — Belmont Shore, Naples, Bixby Knolls, Signal Hill, Lakewood, and Seal Beach are all within our Long Beach-area coverage.
No. Verizon's purchase of Frontier closed on January 20, 2026, and Frontier's own notice says your plan, your equipment, the MyFrontier app, and your separate Frontier bill all continue as they are, with advance notice of anything else. The one thing to watch is email or texts about "moving" or "reconfirming" your account during the handover — sign in from the app or an address you typed yourself instead of following a link, and call us if a message looks off.
Because fiber speed stops at the ONT, the provider's box wherever the line enters — often the garage or a side wall — and the router usually sits right beside it. Full speed at that wall tells you nothing about the back bedroom. We move the router, run a line to a better spot, or add mesh so the coverage matches the connection you are paying for.
It should, and it is the thing almost nobody adjusts. Long Beach Public Works already tells residents in a flood-hazard area to elevate or relocate panel boxes, furnaces, water heaters, and washers and dryers — but the ONT, the router, the power strip, and very often the household's only backup drive are sitting on that same garage floor, because that is where the fiber came in. We lift what can be lifted onto a wall plate or a high shelf, relocate the router into the house on a single run (which usually fixes upstairs coverage at the same time), and get the backup drive indoors with a second copy off-site. Check your own address against FEMA's flood maps first — the city's flood-zone page points you at them.
Early fall, and there is a real date behind it. The California King Tides Project, run by the state Coastal Commission, publishes the highest predicted tides of the year ahead of time: this season they land on November 24-26 and December 23-25, 2026, and on January 21-22, 2027. A king tide alone is just a very high tide, but those are the windows where a winter storm and a big swell can put water where it does not normally go, and the city works to the same clock — the sand berms along the Peninsula and at Alamitos Beach get built up in the fall, and sandbag distribution opens at the 72nd Place lifeguard station and at fire stations around town. Moving a router off the ONT into the house, lifting the power strip and equipment onto a wall plate, and getting the backup drive indoors with a second copy off-site is an easy hour on a dry day in September or October. It is a bad job to attempt with a warning already posted.
No. The city notified affected people by U.S. mail, and the dedicated response line it ran for that notification operated from April 14 to July 15, 2025 and is closed — the city's own page says the 90-day notification period is complete and no further updates are anticipated. So an unexpected call, text, or email now, offering to check whether you were affected, to enroll you in credit monitoring, or to process a claim or settlement, is not the city. Do not confirm your Social Security number or date of birth to whoever is on the line; hang up and read the city's own page at longbeach.gov/networksecurityincident instead. If you already gave something away, call us and we will work through which accounts need locking down first.
The letters went out from April 14, 2025 to the last known home address the city had, so anyone who moved or was renting may never have seen one. The city put the same disclosure on a public page at longbeach.gov/networksecurityincident for exactly that reason, with the FAQs posted in English, Spanish, Khmer and Tagalog. The practical steps do not depend on the letter: place a security freeze with all three credit bureaus (free, and it stays until you lift it), pull your free credit reports, and turn on two-factor for your bank and for the email account that can reset everything else. Freezing is now managed through an account at each bureau rather than a mailed PIN, so we can set up a password manager holding the three credit-bureau logins and your recovery codes somewhere you will still be able to find them in five years, which is the part people usually lose.
Lakewood · Signal Hill · Seal Beach · San Pedro · Los Alamitos
Long Beach is framed by the I-405, I-710 (down to the port), and SR-22, with PCH and 2nd Street as key surface routes. The 405 and 710 port-truck traffic are worst at peak; midday and evenings are our easiest windows.
General guidance based on typical conditions — not live traffic. Call and we'll give you a realistic arrival window for right now.
Call us now and speak directly with a technician.
(626) 655-0020Prefer to text? Send us a message.
Tell us what's going on and we'll get back to you within a few business hours. For something urgent, call us — we usually answer on the first try. We come to you across Southern California, or fix many issues by remote support.
