vaporloop

Verizon FiOS came to my street a little over a year ago.  With the promise of a free 19″ flat screen TV and lower monthly bills than Comcast was offering I decided to make the switch from cable to FiOS.  Having lived with FiOS for a year now I can report on the good, bad and ugly of switching to FiOS.

 

The Good:

FiOS TV: The picture quality is excellent.  I purchased a 42″ Philips 1080p LCD and connected it to the HD box.  One of the first shows we were able to watch in HD was the Planet Earth series on Discovery Channel.  When a program is shot in HD from start to finish the picture quality is truly amazing.  You do almost feel like you are in the picture.  My wife is not a huge football fan, but watching the Superbowl in HD almost made her a convert (better luck in 2010, Patriots).  There are now about 100 HD channels available in the lineup, but we rarely switch between HGTV and Food Network.

 

One thing to realize about FiOS (and Comcast, I believe) is that the maximum picture quality you will get from your provider is 1080i.  Unless you are going to hook up a Blu-ray player or other 1080p source to your TV the extra expense for a 1080p TV set will not be realized.

 

DVR: The interface on the DVR is leaps and bounds ahead of what I had with Comcast, however, it still isn’t as good as TiVo  (Comcast is now offering TiVo with it’s service, so I may ultimately switch back).  Fortunately the search feature is pretty easy to use, as there are over 1400 numbered channels on the lineup now.  The remote is also much better than the Comcast remote I had (one of the least intuitive designs I’ve ever seen).  Again, the TiVo remote was still my favorite for comfort, design and intuitiveness, but the FiOS remote isn’t bad. 

 

Home Phone: It works like a phone should work.

 

Internet:  The speed is a little slower than I had with Comcast (5Mbps down versus 8 with Comcast) but I don’t do a lot of stealing music or movies or software so I have yet to find myself frustrated by the connection speed.  Setting up my VPN to my office was also hassle free and works with little to no lag most of the time.  The wireless router/modem combination works well, with plenty of range.  The router is in my attic office and we get an excellent signal throughout our 3000 sf house.  Two wireless laptops and a Wii all connect without issue at a consistent 45-54 mbs and an “excellent” signal strength.

 

The Bad:

Cost:  Verizon advertises Phone, TV and Internet packages at around $120 a month.  Unlike cable, however, you can’t plug a TV into the coaxial jack and get basic cable like I was able to do with Comcast.  This means you need a box in every room.  An HD box with DVR and Home Media features costs about $20 a month.  The Home Media feature allows you to watch what’s on the DVR on another TV set, which we do find handy.  However, the home media feature is also supposed to also allow you to view your photos and listen to music from your computer.  It works, but it’s painfully slow.  The software you need to install on your computer indexes your photos and makes thumbnails.  So now I have Windows thumbs.db files, my Zoombrowser (Canon camera) thumbnails, and my Verizon home media thumbnails.  I need more hard-disk space to store thumbnails than to store my actual pictures.  Again, TiVo had this nailed perfectly, and I miss you both dearly. Standard definition boxes add another $5 a month to your bill.  We have 3 HD capable TVs in our house, but only one HD box as we don’t want to pay another $20 a month to have HD on all of our HD capable sets.  Movie packages run about $20 and up .  Here’s the break down of our bill:

 

The Triple Freedom Package (TV, Phone, WWW) $99.99

Movie Package (everything but HBO and Cinemax) $12.99

2 Standard Def Boxes   $9.98

Home Media DVR HD    $19.99

Taxes $14.15

For a total of $157.10

 

With a rental or two my bill is more on the average of $170 per month, or about $25 more than I was paying for cable.

 

Phone:  My only complaint… no call waiting caller ID.

 

 

The Ugly:

DVR:  The DVR contains a 60GB hard drive.  When the hell was the last time anyone bought a 60GB hard drive?  I bought 500GB drives over a year ago for less than $150.  You’d think that at the very least there would be a 120 or 200GB drive.  Even with nothing recorded the DVR is always 50% full (maybe because it is caching what’s currently on?).  We like to keep a handful of kid shows on the DVR for our daughter, and there are a few series that we follow and the DVR is always nearly full.  If you want to record HD you’re limited to about 4-6 hours of total storage.  Recording only SD channels bumps that up to about 40 hours, but what’s the point of a HD DVR and TV if you have to record everything in SD?  There’s a FireWire port on the front of the DVR that I would love to plug my own external drive into, but the port is disabled and can’t be used.

 

Conclusion:

I’m going to give Verizon a few more months, and see what Comcast has to offer in competition.  FiOS is better than the Comcast I left, but it may not be better than the Comcast I return to, if that includes a true TiVo package.