sbernstein5: Thanks for your update. Please just don't confuse yourself or others by agreeing to a baseless suggestion that sunspots were the problem when they weren't.
I already stated that Verizon is aware of the problem and that it is originating from SHE 1 according to Verizon. As usual, they don't seem to know how to fix the problem. At least for VHO 6, service was switched away from SHE 1 (again) in the early AM hours on 8/1 so that service wasn't a complete mess yesterday. It's nice that they can work around this particular problem by switching away from SHE 1, but they don't seem to know or care that things are broken again whenever the VHOs start using SHE 1 again. As a result, customers were pointlessly inconvenienced for over a week until this latest switch away from SHE 1 eventually took place.
Among other things, I've done side-by-side tests comparing FiOS TV with Dish Network and DIRECTV and in two years I've seen a handful of interruptions originate from each of the satellite providers while many thousands of interruptions have originated from Verizon. There have only been a few days in the past year that FiOS TV wasn't interrupted at all. Only once did I come across an interruption in the satellite feed so that multiple providers experienced the same problem at the same time, and that interruption was for less than a second.
Some details on my earliest experiences with how unreliable FiOS TV is are in another thread from 2010: »
Random Freezing, Audio Loss, and Pixelation from VHO 6. The situation has become worse since then so that the plot of interruption time points is almost always a solid line. As the service became worse, it became impractical for me to continuously monitor the service's integrity (which Verizon is supposed to be doing, but apparently their systems are so bad that they fail to detect most problems I report to them until their employees manually confirm the existence of the problems by watching problematic channels like any customer would).
Verizon has never fixed any of the problems I've found and reported to them even after they verified that the problems exist. Some have been national problems (with SHEs), some have been issues with VHO 6, but in all cases the problem does not get fixed. Problems sometimes temporarily go away when Verizon switches between various existing resources, but once a new problem is introduced it never goes away and just gets added to their previous mix of problems.