Verizon’s FIOS broadband service offering has been absolutely stellar in the roughly three years I’ve had it. And I’ve been quite happy the last few months with FiosTV feeding CableCards in my Tivo instead of some random crappy DVR. There have been a few billing oddities which have incurred the standard incumbent monopoly customer service difficulties in resolving, which is “normal” (unfortunately).
But I’m quite concerned learning today that Verizon’s apparently sweetened a deal with Frontier Communications to sell a bunch of rural land lands by adding in the Portland area FIOS internet/phone/TV customers. It’s hard to imagine this sort of a business deal working well for us customers.
Specifically, I can see it bringing:
- worse TV channel selection
- slower movement of channels to HD
- higher compression of HD channels and lower video quality
- lower peered bandwidth, ie: Verizon’s well connected to the internet…how will Frontier be? This aspect of provider-to-internet bandwidth can matter more than the 15Mbps they have dedicated between my house and their system.
- higher latency, ie: Verizon’s well connected to the internet…will Frontier be? Currently I get the best ping times to various internet destinations that I’ve ever had at home. It’s hard to imagine a small, relatively capital poor company having the infrastructure Verizon has.
- hypothetical service degradations due to Frontier network inadequacies leading to the “need” for a “fix” by way of instituting tiered-internet, non-network-neutral bandwidth capping and traffic shaping, eg: for instance having to pay extra to be allowed a reliable VPN connection to work.
This should be a fun transition. I wonder how long until Comcast starts calling offering me deals to switch? To bad they’re a non-starter due to their bad network policies.