Re: Verizon Fios vs Comcast - Please help!
Posted by:
Innerference292
()
Date: February 10, 2013 05:54PM
When I moved into a rooming house in Sterling, the landlord had a business in the basement and he had Verizon run cable, phones and a DSL to the house, as we were right near the Verizon central switching station.
At that time, there were 5 rooms with seperate occupants and each of the rooms was wired with cable. The internet was wired into each room by a separate cable out of the back of the main router downstairs. The TV worked fine, and when one or more of the roommates weren't downloading movies at the same time on the internet it worked fine for everyone, too, until a big rain hit, and the Verizon stuff especially the landline phones would all go out. Then the landlord would be fighting with the Verizon people trying to get them to replace the old cables in the yard that were always getting waterlogged. After a month of them bickering back and forth and the Verizon guys failing to show, several heavy equipment operators and a crew arrived one day and dug up his entire front lawn and replaced all the old cables--which had apparently been replaced several times before, too, and the older ones not yet removed--but it took him lots of fighting and arguing and demanding over the phone. Finally we had phone service back again!
The place I live now in Loudoun County had Fios initially. The problem we had with Fios is that the TV setup would only work for one room, the guy's room who had it installed and whose name was on the invoice. They (Verizon) refused to enter the attic to trouble shoot the wiring and to rewire through the attic to get the cable plug working on the one side of the house upstairs. The cable plug available in that room would not process the signal except by the tv screen going dark in "downloading" mode for several minutes then showing a couple minutes of the feed, off and on, off and on and on (the TV was not broken--it was a brand new digital HD flat screen TV right out of the box).
Verizon said their insurance would not let their techs climb a ladder to enter the attic crawl way to reach that side of the house to replace the cable up there, and anyway they did not do wiring period. We would have to hire a private contractor at great expense just to run that replacement wire from the outside box throught the walls and over top of the house to that other room to be able to get a second cable station working in the house. Same for the 3rd tenant room in the basement.
The second problem was that Verizon would then charge us 3 times the "advertised rate" for 3 viewing outlets, one in each tenant room in the house, and each tenants' needed peripheral equipment, as well. Now with all the added equipment and taxes and hours and hours over days and weeks on the phone trying to get them to actually answer the phones, (hope you are self employed and can work from home if you have Verizon, for you will be on the phone much of your time due to Verizon's abysmal "non-customer service" policies and no one working there if you could reach them ever knowing how to handle your problems for days on end).
After hassling with them for months, due to us fellow tenants complaining that we had no TV service, the tenant who had installed the Fios (who failed even though he knew the ropes at Verizon as he had been working there) moved out. We lost no time in switching to Comcast. Now we get super TV, really great customer service, 54 MPS wireless internet (100 MPS if direct wired) and our needs are not only met but over-met--the techs that show up here do more than run in watch the clock for 15 minutes and run out like the Verizon techs did counting the clock--they actually take care of the problem for you, or as much as they are able to do. One came in and replaced all our connectors and splitters and a big chunk of wire coming in from outside because the original wiring used in the house was a cheap type that is 30 years old and is not carrying signal used in the new equipment well. Verizon had tried to make us do that on our own.
Of course those of you having problems with Comcast might be living in an area where the customer service out of your local Comcast office is not up to par. But we are in Loudoun County and we have no issues with them and would not switch back to Fios again for anything. Fios works best if you will have only the one TV and internet connection coming into your apartment or house. They simply do not have any way set up for multiple stations in a house without the tenants paying for them through the wing-wang as if they were on multiple individual accounts; and they refuse to install multiple accounts under one umbrella account in a rooming house--they simply do not recognize the need for that option, although many people are living like that nowadays.