Surfing the big wave....
 

It took almost six hours and five holes cut into my drywall but I'm finally up and surfing the web fiber optic style with Verizon Fios. The installers were great. They installed the NID on the outside wall and it's power supply in the basement. Of course my home Network Operations Center (NOC) is located on the main floor opposite where the NID was installed. Their first option was to run the LAN cable across the front of the house. Ahh No. I don't think so. Next they wanted to go through the attic, out the other side and around the front of the house. Ahh No. So their next "idea" was to run it through the house. Yes! That works. So that's the way we went. They were trying to fish the cable with only cutting finger sized holes in the drywall, I was getting impatient and kept grabbing my own drywall saw and cutting larger holes. Overall they were very professional and accommodating as long as I was willing to push them a bit.

I opted for the relatively tame 5MB down / 2MB up package with a static IP.

Next week they come back to install the Fios TV. I'll post a review if anyone is interested....

Is this different/faster than cable modem? I haven't heard of Fios.

Yes, it's faster. It's fiber optic.

Depending on what level of service you pay for, cable modem speeds range from around 1.5Mbps to 10Mbps download and from around 384Kbps to 1Mbps upload. For FIOS, the range is on the order of 5Mbps to 30Mbps download, and 2Mbps to 5Mbps upload.

Yes. It's a serivce from Verizon that is based on Fiber Optics rather than copper cable (although the fiber part does not go into your house)

You can get speed ranging from 5MB to 30MB downstream and unlike cable you do not share bandwidth with the neighbours. Reviews have been very positive so far.

It's available in fairly limited areas right now.


Ps. In my OP i ment to say my service is at 15MB down / 2MB up.

My friend has VZ FiOS. I totally love it. But more importantly, he totally loves it. The only negative with the cable/dvr package is that it isn't nearly user friendly as TiVO. But I've found that with Cox DVR too.

I think it's only in HB right now though - the test market in OC.

I'm giving the "Home media" dvr a try. They say it will allow me to watch recorded content on any TV in the house with up to three diffrent shows playing at any one time. Since I watch about zippo "live" TV anymore it should be fun. Apparently it lacks the 30 second skip feature. In it's place there is a 4x fast forward however the Googleverse seems to say there are ways to get the 30 second skip back....

I seem to recall that being a big deal when he got it. But that was about 2 months ago and I have a very short term memory. I know he has a box for each TV. I'll have to ask about that tonight.

I also recall him needing to keep upgrading stuff. It seemed the package that he bought didn't have "what he needed". The HD recording sucks up space on the hard drive - so make sure you get a big one.

Despite my rather high tech veneer I am for the moment at least depressingly HD free. So in theory I should get about 120 hours of record time.

Hehe. FIOS caused a chain reaction resulting in a new TV. :evil:

I actually just switched from FiOS to just regular cable. I couldn't justify the expense. We were on a package with VZ that had everything but the TV. By switching it over to cable, we were able to go from a $150/month bill for cell phones, regular phone and FiOS without cable/satellite/cool-stuff-on-TV to ~$100 for all of that, plus cable-TV. So far, there's only been a small sacrifice in download times (it appears) for when I'm downloading something huge or for when I'm downloading multiple items of medium size.

I'm glad I switched.