Daily Technical

I live in the central part of Long Island in New York. In my area there has always been only two options for TV service (other than antenna) which are Cablevision (the Optimum product) and satellite TV. I’ve never had satellite TV and other than the great feature of the NFL Sunday Ticket, never had any desire to own satellite TV.

I had the ‘Optimum Triple-Play‘ package for over 4 years. Overall, the service was perfectly acceptable. However, the lack of competition for cable programming in my area did nothing to push them to innovate or offer up compelling products – until Verizon finally launched their FiOS product.

I signed up with Verizon in early September. 30 days in, here is my abbreviated review of my Fios experience to date, compared to my 4 years of experience with Cablevision:

I’ve purchased a bundle deal, as I did with Cablevision; I have the TV / Internet / Home Phone option with Fios. (and the freebie netbook from HP after 90 days.)

TV: Great! Absolutely love just about every aspect of the Fios television offering. An abundance of great channels, plenty of my favorites available in HD. Quality picture, clarity surpasses Optimum. Intuitive on-screen guides. Awesome multi-room DVR. Simple one-button recording. Multiple methods to search for programming – very functional and flexible. Handy widgets. Excellent online features to complement in-home capabilities, such as scheduling recordings (even from your smartphone).

Internet: Good. I have the 25/15 package (25Mb down/15Mb upload). If the speed were consistent, I’d be much happier. In the first 2 weeks of service, the bandwidth would fluctuate between literally .56Mb down to 35MB down. After calls with tech support, it has been more stable, although it still varies much more than I would like. Optimum, although not quite as fast with the base package that I had, was much more reliable.

Home Phone: Stinks. A little clarification; the phone service itself functions just fine. My issue lies in the lack of features that are included with the package. With Optimum I had some nifty little management tools available via the Optimum Voice website which I became very fond of. Things like a complete record of all inbound and outbound calls, available in real-time and on-demand. Ability to email a copy of all voice mails to my personal account. A simple dashboard to control features such as call forwarding, vip ringing, ‘find me’ feature. None of these were available to me when I signed up for Fios service, even though this is supposedly an IP based voice line. However, after much legwork by me, I found out that Verizon does have an application named the ‘Call Assistant’ which does provide some of the functionality I was looking for, such as inbound call log and notification of voice mail by email. But not much else. Oh, and I have to use IE or Netscape to run this app. I use neither of these browsers day to day.

Installation: Two parts to this; 1) Placing the order with the door-to-door salesgirl proved to be simple. Actually having the order go through the proper channels at Verizon to have installation techs scheduled to do the job proved to be another story. After multiple phone calls in the first week after signing on the dotted line, I found out that they had a total of THIRTEEN separate orders for me in their system. For one installation. 2) Labor – the tech who did my install was very efficient, knowledgeable, friendly and helpful. Installed my 3 set-top boxes, necessary equipment in my basement, configured and tested the free wireless router and replaced 3 old splitters in about 3 hours time. No muss, no fuss.

Contract: Ridiculous. Was necessary to commit to a one-year deal to obtain competitive pricing. With Optimum, no contract was necessary. One funny note on this, Verizon liked to tout their 30 day out clause, which stated you could quit their service at any time within 30 days of your order date with no penalty. Note that I said within 30 days of your order date – that’s right, burned through over a week of that 30 days from the time I signed the contract until the service was actually installed so that I could even begin to test their system.

Support: I’ll give Verizon a thumbs up for their handling of support calls – and I have had several in the last 30 days, primarily around billing screw-ups. Although it’s frustrating that I have been put into the position of having to call for support so many times in the past month, in literally every case the rep was very helpful and courteous. One nice surprise was that on every handoff that had to be made, the rep doing the handoff would explain to the next rep – with me on the phone – everything that had been done or discussed to that point so that I wouldn’t have to repeat myself. Nice.

To sum up, I can say that I will certainly keep my Fios service as-is at least until my contract expires (who wants to pay termination fees?). At that time, me and the folks at Verizon might have to have ourselves a little talk about their internet and phone service. And it’s entirely possible that I may end up back over at Optimum for these two services – unless something even better comes along by then. And unless Verizon does something to completely hose their TV offering, I will be a long-time consumer on this front.

I’d love to hear about your Fios or Optimum experience, please feel free to comment.