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Had SE DSL, varies versions of for past few years. Was expensive but always generally happy with it. Then VZ put fiber in my 'hood. For the cost of bundling TV, phone, and 'net (about $130/month incl taxes/fees), I get faster service (5/2 instead of 5/768) and save about $90/month over SE, Comcast, and VZ POTS. Installers were a great pair and did the house as requested. Spent a solid 5 or 6 hours here. Totally competent process. 'Net speed is consistent and a little over-provisioned as opposed to SE's under-provisioning. The router is ridiculous and seems to need rebooting once a week to fix routing or something (house computers get timeouts to the net - though TV still works), but a mild hassle. I don't like VZ's DNS redirect page either. Tried OpenDNS but had spotty results. TV reception is great on SD and HD TVs. The guide still kinda sucks and I can't believe they still don't do 'cool' things like caller ID on the TV...but for TV, it's great (VOD could have more of a free movie selection). No worries on the phone - all seems to work fine. Nice to have Caller ID, etc included. The battery backup barely lasted 8 hours on a recent outage with minimal phone usage, no net usage. Lame. If a concern, have other battery backups. Overall, totally worth it. Too bad the advent of FIOS really hasn't brought down prices overall - when my two year contract is up, I think prices will go up to where I was before...And I hate that I'm giving all money to Verizon (argh). But no regrets so far overall. Way to go VZ on delivering a solid product. Update: 5/21/09 Got the router swapped for a newer model of that same huge Actiontech a couple months ago. Definitely seemed to help the daily drops. It still happens, seems to be related to lots of net activity from the various computers in the house (NAT/routing table?) but only once every couple weeks, definitely a lot less than before. Also a couple months ago, heard VZ had bumped the standard connection in my area to 10/2. I called to upgrade, which required adding a year to my contract. Since I've never seen prices actually come down since I've had broadband, more than happy to 'lock in' my current pricing for another year. I'd like to see that happen again - another standard boost to, say, 15/5, I upgrade, and add another year at the same cost. I'm finding it harder and harder to dislike Verizon. Absolutely no issues with the phone, though we still use an answering machine and not the voicemail (old habits). TV is still pretty good. More occasional pixelation, likely as more users in the 'hood hook-up, and the guide STILL sucks and is inaccurate, and still a rather lame VOD (well, lame free VOD). But, still, definitely pleased with the service overall. Update: 9/14/14 Still with FIOS. Comcast's offering is competitive but I'm pretty happy with FIOS service overall. There was some mysterious outage a couple weeks ago just in our neighborhood. Rumor was a dump truck snagged the line a couple streets over. It took TWO DAYS to fix. That made me mad. What, not enough linemen on the job anymore? Two days would be like post-hurricane response time around here. Super hassle too as I work from home, so had to go to local library for those two days. I love the library but not working there 8+ hours. They did credit my account $8 :P and I'll likely stick with them, as long as this doesn't happen often. That was really unacceptable response time for a downed local line. Speed is now 15/15, though most recent speedtest.net test shows 24/13mbps. That's great for our home; work-from-home, Xbox, wife and kids on their own computers. TV guide is better; the SD box is super slow, HD box acceptable. They reorganize channels more then I'd like and they just dropped BBC America from our under-contract package! Can they do that? A call to complain is on the list... Overall, 4 out of 5 so far. member for 23.1 years, 5394 visits, last login: 84 days ago updated 9.5 years ago
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