It’s an exciting day here at the Jarrett house. The new drop that I mentioned on Friday is a fiber drop. We’re in the middle of a Massachusetts snowstorm, with another three to six inches on top of the ten we got yesterday, and Verizon, God bless ’em, is in my driveway getting ready to run fiber into my basement.
Now that’s service. I don’t know what it says about their customer acquisition metrics and their incentive comp that this guy is willing to trudge around my house and do this, but whatever it is, Harvard or someone should write a case study about it, ’cause it’s working.
What do I get with fiber? One line that replaces cable and phone, 20 Mbit/s down and 5 up, and finally I get to kick Comcast to the curb. Plus, as a bonus, the installer is going to clear out some of the muddle of cable splits that were a legacy of my incremental installation approach, and wire the living room off the central panel. Might even get Cat 5 up there by the time we’re done, who knows?
The number one reason I got FiOS out of that whole list, by the way, was not the speed. Even though it’s twice as fast as what we’re getting from cable right now. (It used to be four times as fast, but Comcast recently did a speed boost.) No, I’m excited because I finally get to give Comcast the finger for filtering Internet traffic based on what application you’re using, and for arbitrarily imposing bandwidth caps. Doesn’t matter if I wouldn’t hit those caps today; the way they made the announcement, the fact that you can’t know if you’re exceeding the caps until they cut you off, and the outrageousness of the fines, all mean that they have no idea how to deal with customers.
I don’t have illusions that Verizon is going to be perfect, but I think they’ll be better. I have evidence that suggests they will be.
By the way, here’s my Comcast speed test on a Sunday morning with no one else on the local loop. This is the best speed you get with Comcast. I’ll post an update once the FiOS numbers are in.
