FiOS
I just had Verizon FIOS installed for TV and internet, replacing Comcast. For the internet I got 15Mbps down, 2Mbps up. So far my experiments with large files were on and off.
Installation took about 9 hours and they aren’t finished yet, they still have to come back tomorrow and attach a cable. They had to temporarily hook me into my neighbor’s box.
Downloading a 1080p movie trailer from Quicktime.com was very fast. Downloading an episode of The Totoally Rad Show via Juice was very slow, about 400KBps. It could be that I need to forward some ports in the new router they gave me since (I believe) Juice uses bittorrent to download. Azureus won’t download at all, so that may be it. Downloading an HD episode of Diggnation via HTTP quickly topped off at 1.7Mbps, then started slowly dropping, getting as low as 700KBps. Bandwidthplace.com said I had a 1.2Mbps download speed, but they also said they don’t support connections over 8. PCpitstop.com said my download is 12Mbps. This leads me to wonder if they are throttling video downloads. I’ll have to try to find a large non-video file to download and test.
With the TV setup I got one HD/DVR box and one standard box. I was a little disappointed that there is no HD content on-demand. That was something I really enjoyed with Comcast. Also FiOS On Demand seems to be lacking. I expected that i’d never see Comcasts Tube Time OD channel again, but I also seem to be missing some other channels like Sci-Fi and Cartoon Network. possibly others that I haven’t seen yet.
I’ve been hearing all about this new fancy interface that FiOS has and it looks fantastic! In the screenshots I’ve seen on the web. My setup apparently doesn’t have it yet so I get a dull slate gray menu that looks similar to what Comcast has.
The DVR works very well, the remote buttons have a fast response time for FForward, Rewind, Pause and Record. The recorded video quality of HDTV is also extremely good, it looks exactly as it would if it were live. Of course I’ve never had a DVR before, so this may be the same with TIVO or Comcast.
Over all I’m sorry to say I’m a little disappointed. Hopefully it will get better, with the nearly unlimited speed of fiber Verizon should be able to offer a lot more.
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