I think I’ve pretty much decided I’m getting FiOS Internet service. Road Runner internet blows.
However, I’m tempted to get one of their Internet+TV “bundles.”* They recently did away with contracts, and the price seems economical to me, as long as I can freely cancel when they decide to jack up the price after the first year.
However, I’ve never had cable TV in my life. I enjoy Blu-Ray movies, local stations, and producing my own HD content. But, in your humble opinion, am I missing out on something by having an HDTV and not subscribing to TV service? Is FiOS better than cable?
*The TV service is the “Extreme HD” plan…about 300(!) channels.
As it happens, we switched to Verizon FIOS and its “Extreme HD” package about a year ago. Actually we have their whole “Internet+TV+Phone” combo.
Previously we had Comcast cable for TV and Verizon for our Internet (DSL) and landline phone and we decided to convert to either all Comcast or all Verizon to save money. We ended up picking Verizon because we were already using them for Internet access and wanted to keep our existing Verizon.net email IDs.
We’re very happy with our Verizon service, but I’ll bet we’d have been very happy with the Comcast option as well.
For any question about TV or audio visual stuff make sure you look at the AVS Forums. Be prepared to spend a few hours reading with all the advice. And they are very friendly so ask questions.
I’ve been very pleased with my FiOS Triple play bundle. TV is as good or better than Comcast in my area and costs less for what we want.
Fiber is the future, soon we will look at copper wires to our homes as something as quaint as dial phones. Hopefully, as in the rest of the world, a fiber to our homes will become a regulated utility ‘pipe’ and we will be able to pick and choose our ISP and TV providers separately.
We’ve had FIOS TV+phone+internet for 3 years now, and are happy with it. Multi-room DVR, which is nice with the kids. My only complaint is that the DVR is small - 160 GB, and they run un-re-compressed HD (some cable companies compress the HD signal they get from the networks to save bandwidth), so you only get 14-15 hours of HD recording.
Ditto what muldoonthief said. The DVR capacity is the reason I won’t be going with FiOS when I move in a few months. I got up to 100 hours or so on my DirecTv DVR and 20-ish hours is horrible.
Otherwise, I’ve been pretty happy with the FiOS triple play bundle.
I have also had the Fios triple play bundle for over 2 years with the extreme hd package. I have been extremely pleased with the quality and the customer service. Another good thing about fiber is that i have never lost service to tv, phone or internet due to bad storms or any other reason. Not even a flicker. I understand the complaints abot storage but i record all my shows in HD (about 20 different tv shows) and they last about a week before they start to get overwritten by new shows which is plenty of time for me to watch them. If you like to save a lot of movies or shows for long periods of time you might run into problems though.
Fios also has a lot of neat options for free too such as having caller id showing on your television when you get a phone call (a box appears in the corner of the tv when a call comes in showing the name and phone number of the incoming call) and links between the internet and tv where you can go online and select shows to record on your DVR remotely. I have had Comcast and Directv in the past and I think FIOS blows them completely out of the water in both cost and quality. I currently pay $109 a month for the bundle which includes Telephone (unlimited long distance, voice mail, etc), Internet (20 MB down / 5 MB up), and TV (Extreme HD package plus movie package which includes HBO, Cinemax, Starz, Encore, etc). With 2 HD DVR boxes plus taxes etc my bill each month runs around $135 total.