Anyone tried FIOS yet?

[Mageling]

I'm moving in the next week and a half and deciding if I want to upgrade my internet to Verizon FIOS services. I saw a post a while back regarding one of their routers, but no other real discussions on FIOS benefits/negatives/etc and thought that I'd ask.

I'm currently running Comcast 7mb down (burst) 5mb constant, 1.5mb up and pay about $55 a month for it. I just checked to see if FIOS is available in my new neighborhood and found some pretty reasonable prices.

Option 1: 15mb down, 2mb up - $60/mo

Option 2: 15mb down, 15mb up - $70/mo

Have any of you had experience with FIOS? Do you see pretty steady uptime? I do a lot of on-call work from home in the evenings and the last thing I want to do is drive to either work or the local 24 hour Starbucks just to get shit taken care of when we have a pretty strict timetable of getting sites back up and running. (I do a lot of work with hospital admission/billing/coding/etc software)

Ultimately I'd like to make a decision by the end of the weekend so I can try getting interweb set up at my new house as soon as possible, and the benefits of not having to screw with Comcast's services and outages between moving would be great.

Edited for the masses. I had cross posted this from my guild forums, where a lot of "us" are from the same area.

[James]

You're moving 'here'? Like, to the internet?

[Soygen]

Originally Posted by James

You're moving 'here'? Like, to the internet?

I don't think FIOS is even planned for South Florida. Fuck 'em.

[theawddone]

My friend has it, it's great, he loves torrents =) If you can afford it, I say there is no better option right now. He has the $70 option I believe.

[McCheese]

it's alright. We've got their TV and Internet and both are decent. Honestly though it's not as amazing as everyone said it would be. Faster and better than cable, and I certainly like it, but it's nothing spectacular.

[Mageling]

I've personally been a bit pissed at Comcast as of late with their service. Even after having a new drop run out to the house my wife and I are moving out of, we still had drops in service and were resetting our cable modem at least 3-4 times a week. Given that it's only a few minutes of downtime, but it's frustrating as hell when it always seems to happen around 5-8pm when I'm raiding and don't even have any torrents running on my machine during that time.

I'll likely end up keeping their TV service, as they're the only ones I'm aware of in the Seattle metro area that carry FOX Soccer Channel.

[Malakriss]

Verizon FIOS is the most consistent reliable internet I've had in 15 years. The TV-Internet-Phone package is significantly cheaper than what Comcast charged for just stand alone TV. There's zero bandwidth throttling or protocol blocking and god knows I've done enough torrents that if they really cared I would have heard something by now.

The only major issue I've seen is installation, which as more to do with the quality of your local tech specialists and contractors than the company itself. Make sure they get everything hooked up right and working, after that the service is superb.

[Moontayle]

Have had it going on 3 years now and I have no complaints. The only downtime I've ever had was self inflicted (my son spilled coffee on the router) and they were out at my place within 24 hours to fix it. I also had an issue with the Cable TV box going wonky via the HDMI port but they fixed it over the phone without me having to do anything or have someone come out to replace the box. Also some of the best customer service I've ever experienced. You'll be in good hands with Verizon FiOS.

[Lyenae]

FIOS is good internet. I think I have a 20/5 package.

No torrent bottlenecking so far at all.

[Mageling]

Thanks for all of the replies, I really appreciate it.

[Wolfen]

Been listening to Leo Laporte's radio show and he had a couple people call in about Verizon fucking up the billing if you get the all-in-one package. Be careful if you go that route.

I'm in SW Florida which is Comcast only land, so no FIOS for me.

[Lyenae]

florida has a SW?

[Rum]

I switched over to Verizon FIOS internet as soon as it was available in my area, (my internet is 20down/10up ( which they don't offer anymore ) and haven't had a single problem with the internet in over the year and a half i have had it. I pay $120 for internet, phone, and tv with 1 hd box, 2 non-hd boxes and 1 dvr hd box which was a lot cheaper then what i was paying befor.

only problem i have had is one of the cable boxes went bad and had to be replaced. oh, and Verizon's customer service sucks.

[Sealody]

I've switch to FIOS a few years ago.

No way I'm back to anything out right now.
I easily saturate my entire bandwidth, upload and download for days constantally without any problems.

2.6Megs/sec down and almost 600K/sec up. Paying 45/month. I accidently left a whole list of torrents running when I went on vacation for over 2 weeks. No problem at all either with throttling or bandwidth caps. Not even a peep from Verizon. It's absolutely great. I'm on a few torrent sites and I'm most of my ratios are very high, it's just so easy to download stuff and not worry about how long it'll take to upload if you do any torrents.

For over 2 years, my roommate was using over a 1TB in bandwidth per month on his personal PC. I used to run SNMP to monitor the WAN just to see. We were always over 1TB/month every month.

I truely hate comcast. He moved to Washington last year and only Comcast is that location (FIOS should be soon I think tho). In his first month, they got disconnected caused they hit (an invisible) 80GB limit that month. She had to call up and deal with their CS BS for that 1 month in. Don't even start with the throttling and their other dirty tricks you read about. It's aweful.

[QforQ]

I'm thinking about getting Fios for both my internet and tv. How is it for the tv service? Right now my house mate is paying for the cable and nets so I'm gonna try to convince him to switch us to Fios...any help with this is appreciated!