Why FiOS is Better Than _____ (anything else)

From what I hve found, FiOS is, by a significant margin, the best service out there. There are several technological reasons for this.



1. Full fiber optic network / FTTP

Fiber to the Premise (FTTP) has an advantage over other services that run copper (Coax or phone line/RJ11) - it has nearly unlimited bandwidth capability that is easily and cheaply scalable one installed. All you need to do to increase the bandwidth oer the fiber is add another band of light through the glass. Under this principle, by installing FiOS in your house, you are future-proofing your connection. Experimental testing over a single fiber optic cable yielded unfathomable transfer rates - Engineers have sent a whopping 1Tbps (yes, that's a TERABIT PER SECOND) pulsing through the same cable that runs from the street into your house.

2. All-but-Dedicated Connection

FiOS service comes so cloe to being a dedicated connection to the Verizon service center that only legal terms and technicalities keep it from being an advertising point. Each fiber in the main network carries data at a rate of 2400 Mbps downstream and 1200 up. This bandwidth is evenly divided into 32 sets of bands of light that each exclusively service one home. Again, if that proves to not be enough bandwidth in the future, more bands of light can be added to each set to immediately increas bandwidth. Now that's what I call, "Broadband"!

3. Latency/Ping

For the internet portion, being able to completely eliminate coax cable from the network loop is huge for preserving low latency. For those who don;t know, latency is the amount of time that a signal takes to get to a given server and back, and is usually measured in milliseconds (ms). I can speak personally about how big an improvement FiOS is. My ping has gone from between 60-70ms on average to 11 - over wireless! And I even have my router hooked throught the coax! I have seen a huge improvement in gaming, and even response time during web browsing.

4. MoCA

Multimedia over Coax Alliance is the service that brings the media guide, on demand, and DVR services to life on FiOS TV. Because it doesn't rely on communicating to the data center to relay every change or action on the guide (which is why cable tends to be so laggy), the responsiveness and ease of use are excellent. It also allows the use of the multi-room DVR, which allows up to 3 simultaneous actions (other than 3 shows recording at the same time). You can watch 2 recorded programs on 2 other TVs, and have a choice of watching live TV or a third recoding on the TV with the DVR box.

Drawbacks

1. Installation costs

This is no object to cutomers, as Verizon eats the installation cost, but that cost averages $3000 to $5000 (O.O Yikes!) due to the high cost of the fiber optic cable. That's the disadvantage of adopting a technology early, I suppose.

2. Required MoCA Router
In almost ever situation involving FiOS TV, you must have the FiOS router conected to the coax. However, if you want your network to bypass their router, have Cat5e cable run from the terminal box to where you will put the router, and "piggyback" it off of your own wired or wireless router. You can turn off the wireless radio and not use it. I have it set up on Coax, so I do it the other way around - I piggyback a wireless N router off of the FiOS router.