With the new apartment came a new service – Verizon's FiOS. Overall I find the experience pretty awesome.
My previous cable provider was Time Warner Cable. I had several issues with the service. The picture quality ranged from fair to awful. Pixilation was a huge issue with animation suffering the most, often rendered jagged. Even HD football didn't quite look like HD sometimes. The other issue I had was the set-top box DVR – a user interface nightmare. I admit that I have been spoiled in the past. I owned a TiVO for many years and I consider that to be the ultimate in television UI. It is intuitive and attractive with many 'delightful' touches that make using it a joy. Time Warner's UI is poorly thought through. I often found myself still stumbling over basic functionality, even though I had owned it for over a year. Considering what I paid, I was unimpressed, which is why I jumped ship to FiOS when I had the chance.
FiOS has many things that I love. The picture quality is fantastic. I never feel as though there's a gap between the data and the display, which would appear as large disconnected pixels in Time Warner's service. The set-top experience is fantastically designed with many options available in an easy to understand fashion. It's the closest thing I've seen to TiVO without being TiVO. The data speed is fantastic; my systems are significantly faster.
The remote is the biggest issue I have with the service right now. I can't seem to pair it with my television, forcing me to use two remotes when I really should only have to use one. The remote also 'loses' it's connection with the set-top box, forcing me to reset it all the time. With channel numbers reaching into the 1800 and 1900, there should be easier ways for me to comb through all of the channels. Perhaps dividing them into subgroups – for example, music or kids, or sports – so I can surf certain channels more easily.
Overall though I'm happy with the service. It costs about the same as Time Warners but I feel as though I'm getting so much more. That's a great place to be.
1 comment:
Fios really is a great service. I think TiVo users are just used to the TiVo interface and don't like others like Verizon fios. I think it's just as good if not better. In fact, I've found that the TiVo menus are slower to respond that the fios interactive media guide. The only downside is the dvr capacity. TiVo box can add external storage. The fios dvr cannot as of now. Of course you can use TiVo with fios it's just a bit more complicated to setup.
If you're not happy with the remote, I say do your self a favor and something like the Harmony One.
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