Friday, January 25, 2008

FiOS Here I Am

The Verizon FiOS installer came and went at my house yesterday, and now I'm fiber-equipped. The installer arrived around 10 a.m., zipped around inside and outside the house, and everything was up and running by 5:30. Not every FiOS install goes so smoothly. Given the design of the house, the layout of our existing wiring, and an in-house personal IT network technician whose room-and-board is supplied by his parents, we're fortunate to have resources that are not easily matched around Mt. Lebanon.

The Verizon installer was very efficient, very professional, and very generous with his insights and advice about system setup questions. Our Internet connection speeds are noticeably faster than they were under our Comcast (cable) setup. The basic FiOS TV channel lineup is impressive. (Look, they're speaking Spanish!)

Two hiccups:

The Mt. Lebanon public access channels (municipality and school district) are not available on the Verizon system. Mt. Lebanon's website advises that this will happen within a year.

We had to redesign our prior TiVo setup to ensure that Verizon FiOS and TiVo get along. Compared to the old setup, where the TiVo tuner and the TV tuner would run off of the same cable feed (via a splitter), now we need one FiOS set-top box for the TV and a separate FiOS set-top box for the TiVo. (Reason: The TiVo can't use the FiOS digital input.) We passed on the Verizon DVR, which would obviate the problem and be cheaper to boot, based on Internet research suggesting the inferiority of the Verizon product. We'll see how this plays out.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Matthew said...

I've been happy with the FIOS internet service since October 2005, so now that FIOS TV is available, I'm curious as to how you would compare it with Comcast...

January 25, 2008 9:42 PM  

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