• A few of the most common links here on the forums for newbies and guests!
  • The TUGBBS forums are completely free and open to the public and exist as the absolute best place for owners to get help and advice about their timeshares for more than 30 years!

    Join Tens of Thousands of other Owners just like you here to get any and all Timeshare questions answered 24 hours a day!
  • TUG started 31 years ago in October 1993 as a group of regular Timeshare owners just like you!

    Read about our 31st anniversary: Happy 31st Birthday TUG!
  • TUG has a YouTube Channel to produce weekly short informative videos on popular Timeshare topics!

    Free memberships for every 50 subscribers!

    Visit TUG on Youtube!
  • TUG has now saved timeshare owners more than $24,000,000 dollars just by finding us in time to rescind a new Timeshare purchase! A truly incredible milestone!

    Read more here: TUG saves owners more than $24 Million dollars
  • Sign up to get the TUG Newsletter for free!

    Tens of thousands of subscribing owners! A weekly recap of the best Timeshare resort reviews and the most popular topics discussed by owners!
  • Our official "end my sales presentation early" T-shirts are available again! Also come with the option for a free membership extension with purchase to offset the cost!

    All T-shirt options here!
  • A few of the most common links here on the forums for newbies and guests!
  • The TUGBBS forums are completely free and open to the public and exist as the absolute best place for owners to get help and advice about their timeshares for more than 30 years!

    Join Tens of Thousands of other Owners just like you here to get any and all Timeshare questions answered 24 hours a day!

Switch to FIOS or not??

KarenLK

TUG Member
Joined
Apr 21, 2006
Messages
1,433
Reaction score
65
Location
near Buffalo, NY
I currently have TimeWarner as my internet provider, and Dish for TV. lately we have been having non-weather events where my TV gets all scrambled. any my internet needs a new box or something, as I have to unplug and replug almost every day. My phone serice at home is through Verizon Wireless.

So, I have a few questions:

Will FIOS have weather problems like the dishes do??

Can I keep my current roadrunner email address if I switch from Time Warner??

Any other pros and cons??
 
I had FIOS for about 3 years until I moved into an area where it was not available. Never once did I lose my FIOS signal. If FIOS had been available in my new location, I would have it today.

George
 
Don't even hesitate. Go FIOS. How I wish we had it as an option here as T/W digital services, speeds and channel selection are terrible by comparison. Plus they charge more than FIOS does. The service stops about 5 miles from us & we have no idea when or if it will be extended our way. It is a no brainer. Go FIOS.
 
I currently have TimeWarner as my internet provider, and Dish for TV. lately we have been having non-weather events where my TV gets all scrambled. any my internet needs a new box or something, as I have to unplug and replug almost every day. My phone serice at home is through Verizon Wireless.

So, I have a few questions:

Will FIOS have weather problems like the dishes do??

Can I keep my current roadrunner email address if I switch from Time Warner??

Any other pros and cons??

No weather problems ... Fios is fiber optic to your home, all underground. It is stunningly fast Internet, all the time. I think it costs too much compared to DSL, but it's probably about the same as by cable.

If you want to keep your Verizon phone, you can save a little with their Triple Play bundle. It makes the phone come out costing nothing, pretty much. But if you can do without the phone (switching to VoIP via Google Voice, Ooma, or whatever; read TUG for details) you can save about $10 more, plus about $8 in taxes and fees, monthly, with a TV-and-Internet Double Play.

Verizon tends to have lame DVRs, and charges $20 per month for them. If you like Tivo, it would be better to get their new Premiere system and a cablecard ($4 from Verizon).

And no, you probably won't be able to keep your roadrunner email address. Certainly not for free. So don't make the mistake again by switching to a Verizon address; set up a gmail or yahoo account. Or maybe you can get a forwarding email through a college alumni group, or something else you belong to. If you need a POP3 type server, make one on Verizon.net, but have your gmail account forward mail there, and publicize the gmail address, not the Verizon one. That way, if it's ever time to dump Verizon, you won't have this problem again.
 
+1 for FIOS!
 
My daughter had FIOS, then changed to cablevision to save money. She went back to FIOS within the month.
 
Another vote for FIOS. Have had it for 3 years. Much better than cable.

Nancy
 
FIOS, Shmyose.

We are not in love with the cable company for internet & TV. Not only that, what we're paying Bell Verizon for copper-wire telephone service added to what we're paying the cable company for TV totals up to more than the advertised price for a FIOS "bundle" of combined telephone-TV-internet service.

So we made ready to say goodbye to the cable company & take the fiber-optic plunge. Trouble is, despite advertising special introductory rates, Verizon couldn't come up with a reliable estimate of (a) what we'd actually pay per month during the introductory period or (b) what we'd have to pay for installation & set-up & equipment, etc., to get started with FIOS. No doubt the technology is excellent. Verizon sales & customer service, not so much. The only way to find out the true cost, we concluded, was to sign up & then wait till we got a bill. We are not the sharpest knives in the dishwasher but even so we're not dull enough to go for that. So we gave up on trying to get FIOS going around here.

Last year our conventional copper wire phone service got crackly & intermittent. When we complained, Bell Verizon sent somebody out to see what was what. The technician who looked into it said the trouble is with the antique wires between here & the trunk line. He said all but 2 of the available pairs were grounded out or shorted out or discontinuous somewhere between the connection box in our neighborhood & the trunk line connection a half-mile from here. He said he hooked us up to 1 of the remaining decent wire pairs & promised to turn in a report to wire maintenance (because the old telephone cables are damaged & in need of replacement). He was not optimistic that new lines would be installed any time soon.

Everything went OK for a few months, although any time there was prolonged rainy weather, our phone calls got more & more crackly, & dial tone was not always available when we wanted to make calls.

Then our telephone service just quit one Friday. Bell Verizon's service person said a technician would come round in 2 weeks. The Chief Of Staff said 2 weeks is not acceptable. After some back & forth, the service person said someone would come by on Monday, leaving us with no phone service over the weekend.

What we should do, the service person said, is upgrade to FIOS because FIOS is not only more reliable to begin with but also because Verizon responds faster to FIOS service calls.

That was not what The Chief Of Staff wanted to hear. She told the Verizon person, "Your regular telephone service is so unreliable that I have no confidence in anything you say about FIOS. If you ever get the conventional telephone lines working reliably in bad weather, then maybe we'll consider upgrading to FIOS. As it is, regular Verizon telephone service gives us no reason to think some different Verizon service would be any better."

With Verizon FIOS now on our bad list & with no Bell Verizon phone service available till Monday at the soonest, The Chief Of Staff was seriously peeved. Plus, the prospect of a whole weekend with no telephone service made her nervous & antsy -- same as I would be with no electric internet all weekend.

"OK," I said. "Get in the car with me & we'll go try Plan B."

Plan B was a quick trip to Radio Shack, where we sprang for Magic Jack. Back home, we connected Magic Jack to an open USB gzinch on the computer, started it up, followed the instructions, signed up for service, & picked out an easy-to-remember phone number in our regular home area code, & plugged a cordless phone into the Magic Jack gzinch. In just a few minutes -- ZAP ! -- The Chief Of Staff was making phone calls again. The old man was a hero there for a while, briefly, until we discovered that calls from Magic Jack do not go through to a number in Shenandoah County VA that The Chief Of Staff calls frequently. So it goes.

Fast forward to the recent el drencho that tore out trees & interrupted power widely & for a long time. Electric service at our house was out about 23 hours. When power came on again, internet & cable TV were still out -- meaning that Magic Jack was not working. But our old fashioned Bell Verizon copper wire telephone service still worked. People in the neighborhood who took phone service from FIOS could not make or receive calls after their back-up batteries ran down. People using internet telephone service from the cable company had no service at all -- no TV, no internet, no telephone.

So our status quo with TV-telephone-internet is something like our status quo with RCI. That is, we don't specially like what we're signed up with, but we don't like any of the other choices out there any better.

So it goes.

-- Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.​
 
That's About The Size Of It.

Frederic_Remington_smoke_signal.jpg

-- hotlinked --

Meanwhile, as if confirming their intent to abandon copper wire telephone service, or let it deteriorate as much as the authorities will permit so that nobody wants to continue with it, Bell Verizon is offering copper-wire telephone customers in our area the opportunity to convert to FIOS technology free (phone service only) at no change in rates, conditions, features, etc.

So it goes.

-- Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.​
 
Hello? Hello? (Don't Try To Call Me. I'll Try To Call You.)

So we made ready to say goodbye to the cable company & take the fiber-optic plunge.
We're switching to FIOS, mainly for TV & DVR even though we're bundling up for the whole megillah (TV + phone + internet).

It was inevitable, I suppose.

Just another small step in Bell Verizon's inexorable march to take over the whole communications world. Amazing that a regional Baby Bell company could swallow up so much of the competition that it has virtually replaced Ma Bell as the 800-lb. coast-to-coast gorilla of telephones & their successor technologies.

Meanwhile, another of the former Baby Bell companies has turned on its parent & gobbled down what's left of AT&T & has taken over that formerly famous name, which is now mainly just another struggling cell phone company.

Who'd a-thunk ?

-- Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.​
 
We just went away from FIOS to save some money. We went to Cablevision and happy we did as its reduced my monthly costs by about $50/month. Verizon did have a good quality but we're very happy with the move. Cable also has faster internet speed than FIOS with their new boost modem so that is a nice plus from the switch as well. I also like that I you can retrieve you my emails on line.

The biggest downside with Verizon is their customer service is just atrocious. Its not a big deal if you don't have any issues but if you do it will be a nightmare. My nightmare with them now is I called to cancel on 6/6. Before I could stop my auto pay they hit my account for all of June. Now I'm still waiting for a refund of $200 which they dragging their feet on.
 
Verizon's Spray Paint Brigade Has Redecorated Our Front Yard.

We're switching to FIOS, mainly for TV & DVR even though we're bundling up for the whole megillah (TV + phone + internet).
FIOS installation is set for Friday. To get ready, guys with spray cans painted the grass red & orange & white to mark the route for stringing buried wires between our house & the Bell Verizon connection box out by the street.

-- Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.​
 
We just went away from FIOS to save some money. We went to Cablevision and happy we did as its reduced my monthly costs by about $50/month. Verizon did have a good quality but we're very happy with the move. Cable also has faster internet speed than FIOS with their new boost modem so that is a nice plus from the switch as well. I also like that I you can retrieve you my emails on line.

The biggest downside with Verizon is their customer service is just atrocious. Its not a big deal if you don't have any issues but if you do it will be a nightmare. My nightmare with them now is I called to cancel on 6/6. Before I could stop my auto pay they hit my account for all of June. Now I'm still waiting for a refund of $200 which they dragging their feet on.

What customer service? When tv is on the blink, you are told how to repair it (even if you are elderly, and have no idea what all those wires are that they are mentioning as needed to be replaced or touched). Also, During a storm, their computers showed our service was restored. (Nada, for our entire block.) Yet, no one was willing to come out and check, until all threatened to cancel.
 
I had Verizon for about 3 years with never a problem and never an interruption in service. I liked the channel selections and their picture. I had to switch when I moved and went to Direct TV and am satisfied there also. In two years storms have interrupted the Direct TV signal 4 or 5 times but in every case it came back in 5 - 10 minutes.

George
 
I am not a big fan of Verizon's inbound phone system -- I mean, when you call them for an order, or repairs, or whatever. Usually it seems impersonal. BUT there have been exceptions. I used to have a phone feature that was de-tariffed and went away, and the business office said "tough". So I called the repair service, and the guy there says "Oh, I can fix that. They just can't sell it." and turned it back on.

We have had FiOS Internet at my wife's office for four years now. I wish I could tell you about the quality of support, but I don't know. Except for an incident where a truck ran into the fiber pedestal, it has not even hiccuped in all that time. And then, when I called, they knew about the problem, said it would be fixed by such-and-such a time, and it was.

At home, we've had it even longer (with TV and until recently phone), and it was flawless until earlier this year. Then the Internet would start interrupting, sometimes recovering by itself after a few minutes, sometimes requiring a restart of the router. They promptly sent a new router, which helped (and improved the Internet speed by reducing DNS caching time), but there were still problems. So they sent a technician who arrived before his scheduled time, calling while on the way to make sure that was OK. We still had the original model of ONT which he said he hadn't seen in a year, so he ordered a new one and came back to install it in a day or two. No problems since, and he called the day after to check.

Nothing to complain about with that. I don't know how it could have been better.

We're in Southern California. Oh, and I've looked at pricing from the cable company and from DirecTV and Dish. If you look at the price after the introductory teaser period, and roll in all the equipment charges, they're all within a few percent ... and way more than I want to pay, but I do. "Oh, but we have 350 channels!" Me:"yeah, but I've only got 24 hours in a day. It doesn't matter if you have 100 or 500, I can't watch any more than I have time to."
 
Last edited:
All Fiossified Here -- Now Zapping Photons Back & Forth Instead Of Electrons.

FIOS installation is set for Friday.
Guy showed up more or less on time, hooked everything up, & we're good to go.

Not only that, I called the cable TV company & told'm we're canceling because we switched to Bell Verizon FIOS.

"But we offer all those services," the cable TV guy said.

"I know, but we didnt go with that," I said. "We're already hooked up with Bell Verizon FIOS, so cable TV is now redundant around here & we're canceling."

"Your service is now canceled & you'll have the final bill in 10 days," the guy said.

Be not the 1st by whom the new are tried, nor yet to lay the old aside.

-- Alan Cole, McLean (Fairfax County), Virginia, USA.​
 
Top