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Letter to the editor

Fiber's speed a hit, installation aside

If the installers hadn't almost burned my house down, I'd say Verizon's new cable television and high speed Internet service was fantastic.

Ever since the smoke cleared, I've enjoyed more than 100 TV channels, a responsive remote and fast Internet connection that rarely falters. If the installers figure out how to tell where power lines run in a wall, the service is nearly flawless.

Verizon Communications Inc., for those keeping score, is a telephone company that's been branching out into other things, such as cable TV. Cable companies, meanwhile, are broadening their offerings to include high-speed Internet and telephone service.

Verizon, which serves 28 states and Washington, D.C., is spending $23-billion to make fiber-optic connections - which it calls FiOS - available to 18-million homes by 2010. By bypassing the old copper phone lines, the company has much more bandwidth available than anyone else.

The company made me a pitch that was too good to refuse: All my telecom services - landline, cell phone, cable and Internet - on one bill.

The package is about $200, $10 a month more than it used to cost me to buy cable from Comcast, and my landline, Internet and wireless services from Verizon or Verizon Wireless. But I figured that $10 was worth it for faster Internet speeds of up to 5 megabits per second downstream (and 2 mbps upstream) and 150 free cable channels - dozens more than I was getting. Verizon threw in a voice mail box, caller identification service and unlimited calling with no extra charge.

We've benefited from channel inflation in home improvement and cooking networks, and gained a slew of new nature, science and history-related channels, many of which I'd never heard of.

On the Internet side, the service has been exemplary. Whereas our old DSL modem had to be reset frequently, I've only had to reset our FiOS modem once. It may be a tad slower than a cable connection, but unless you're downloading gobs of big files, who's the wiser? It's more than fast enough for Webkinz and the occasional cartoon or game.

The landline works and sounds just fine, though it's not your grandfather's phone service - power isn't supplied over the network. Verizon provides an eight-hour backup battery to help you through blackouts.

There was no change to our cell phone service, which we've had through Verizon Wireless for several years.

One complaint is the lack of documentation. I'm not normally a big manual reader, but a simple channel guide would have been nice (I've since found one online).

And there is the small matter of installation. When Verizon runs fiber to your house, the company needs to install a box on an inside wall. It was in drilling through a wall to connect that box to a fiber conduit that our installer hit an electrical wire. That knocked the power out and left our electrical box - and the front of the house - smoking. Verizon's insurance company cut us a check for the $2,650 repair within days.

FAST FACTS

Bay area FiOS

Verizon announced Aug. 29 that it has expanded its fiber optic network availability in more than 17,000 households in northern Pinellas County. Large parts of Hillsborough, Pasco, Sarasota and Manatee counties are FiOS-equipped.

Can you FiOS?

Visit www.verizon.com to check for availability.

[Last modified September 17, 2007, 01:15:54]