I Suck At Fios

today is a glorious day. to say i'm a little giddy with excitement is an understatement. i wonder if this is what my friend (hot amy) was feeling when she recently joined the 21st century by getting cable television the other day.

anyway, today karen and i had fios tv installed at our house. now i suck at fios. fios is "fiber optic service" offered by verizon. the gist of fiber optics is that data travels extremely faster over fiber than copper. in addition to speed, fiber is stronger and has greater tolerance for abuse than copper wire... not that any normal person will be abusing copper wire.

naturally, all of those were selling points for me. plus, i have never been a big fan of our cable provider. our cable provider, currently comcast, was the only company around in our area. so growing up in quincy, there was only one choice for cable television. and as any economic authority can tell you... competition is important in a free market. without competition, product quality can be hampered.

and as expected, prices regularly increased with our cable provider. plus, service was routinely lacking in my personal opinion, which unfortunately could not really be rectified because there was no other option available. so when fios was first delivered to the public, i waited with giddy anticipation until i could jump on the fios bandwagon. the problem: the infrastructure had to be created for fiber in our area.

so since moving to norwell, i begrudgingly used comcast for television. a while back, fios internet first became available in our area, so karen and i had that installed. we just waited until the television portion likewise became available. in fact, my friend (pam) had asked if we would be interested in fios television when it came out because her husband works for verizon.

with my past experience with cable... the thought of getting verizon fios television sounded great, but karen and i always put it on the back burner on our list of things to do, in part because fios tv was not available in our area at the time. as well, both of us were hesitant on the logistics of wires and whatnot in regards to having fios tv... or upgrading cable service in general.

with standard cable, we were simply able to connect the coaxial cable to our television to hide any wires. normally, that would be fine. since getting our ginormous television for the second floor, however, we were finding that we (or more like me...) preferred the high definition channels over the regular channels because the picture was much clearer. (apparently, i have expensive taste.) unfortunately, to get high definition there was no way around not having a set top box. so figuring out what to do in that regards also made delaying the installation of fios tv easier.

and then one day, verizon called out of the blue and simply asked if we wanted fios tv in addition to the internet and phone service that we already had. rather than wait any longer, i agreed (sorry pam!). mathematically and financially, it made more sense.

anyway, today the fios technician (steve) came to install fios tv. incidentally, steve is a product of quincy, class of 1991 (from archbishop williams in braintree). it's a small world. he is a funny guy. we bonded over cookies made by karen. plus, he got to show me how to use the fios set top box. we recorded a little of the rachael ray show... yummers.

all in all, it was great. there is still the problem of wiring logistics and where to run the wires so that it's not a complete tangled mess. wires aside, i'm quite happy with verizon's fios tv thus far. hopefully karen will be equally happy because she hasn't seen the wires yet.