Comcast has overall been VERY reliable here in Crystal City (Arlington, VA). However, here’s my gripe! Arlington, VA is on a old legacy equipment manufactured by Scientific Atlantic which is now owned by Cisco. Comcast for the most part, has left their SA/Cisco markets behind in new services. No XFINITY iPhone Remote App and our HD channel lineup is VERY LIMITING compared to neighboring counties! While Comcast has transitioned Motorola areas to digital only services, doing away with expanded basic analog channels to make way for more bandwidth to provide additional HD and DOCSIS 3.0 internet tiers, SA/Cisco markets have not seen any of this.

Now for Verizon….

I’ve had an absolute HORRIBLE experience with anything to do with Verizon in the past, from DSL, to Wireless, and even FIOS. I had Verizon FIOS over 2yrs ago at my old apartment, my building was an early FIOS deployment for an apartment complex in Montgomery County. Verizon only offered internet service and phone, no TV. Verizon used existing copper telephone lines to provide a vDSL service. They had all the ONTs and battery backup equipment in the basement that terminated to copper. I’ll just leave it at that and spare you the details… I had such a horrible experience I ended up taking a hammer to the vDSL modem and mocca enabled FIOS gateway. (I got pictures somewhere…)

Even with all that, I’ve decided to give FIOS another shot. I went through the order process online, so hopefully they stick to their 24 month promotional pricing structure. At the lowest my new plan is $96/month and goes up to $120/month from month 7 to 24. Their claim is roughly 250 HD channels and I’ll be getting two HD receivers. Internet will be a symmetrical 25Mbps down/up. Overall I’ll be getting more for the money. I don’t agree with Verizon still blocking port 80 on residential accounts but that’s something I can live with.

For those interested, check out this post over at ARLnow.com regarding Comcast and Verizon in Arlington.

Verizon FIOS install date is this coming Wednesday, so we’ll see how that goes…

I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do about my internet connection. I’ll try giving Verizon another chance, this time I will order service over the phone.