I moved this past July to a new house that previously had FIOS installed. I was pretty thrilled with the prospect of getting off of Comcast and moving to Verizon FIOS.

It’s been almost 4 months now since first switching to FIOS for my internet and TV, and as much as it pains me to say it….I would switch back to Comcast if I could.

First off, let me say this: Comcast’s broadband internet service is unstable, has a very poor Quality of Service (QOS) level – so poor that it makes 3rd-party VOIP services, like T-Mobile@Home, more trouble than it’s worth. But, and this is a big BUT, the TV services, while not great and filled with its own set of issues, is so much better than FIOS’s TV service that I’d switch back in a heartbeat.

TV Video Quality

The video quality is probably a bit better with FIOS. Of course, there’s NO WAY anyone can really compare that with any real measure unless they subscribed to both services at the same time and had two different televisions side-by-side. FIOS seems to have more HD channels and an overall nicer picture. Some things are clearly superior, like HBO. On Comcast, I had 11 channels of HBO, and only one came in in HD. The rest was SD. On FIOS, all 11 channels are in HD.

User Interface/Menu System

The biggest problem with FIOS is the TERRIBLE user interface/menu system. I can’t say enough just how horrible it is. Comcast’s was WAY better. From the goofy categorizations of channels that FIOS has, to the slow response of the box, it is just horrible compared to Comcast. And let’s face it, the user interface is a big part of the service. My wife still hasn’t figured out how to use the damn thing, but she has trouble working the toaster too…

Remote Control

The Comcast remotes suck. Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse….Verizon outdoes them with the suckiest remote of all time! The remote is very ‘mushy’ in feel and the box is just slow to respond. It’s just flat-out annoying. And that along with the horrible menu system makes it just annoying at best.

Example: a couple of weeks ago I was on the internet when I got word that the remake of The Prisoner was finally coming on TV. So I go to my TV and make sure to schedule the series to record (more on the shitty DVR later). Problem is, there’s no way that I can find to jump from day to day, to record a future show. You have to manually keep pushing the right-arrow button on the remote and go through every half-hour increment between the present time and when the first instance of the show starts. It’s horrible! On Comcast’s remote there were DAY+ and DAY- buttons, so if a show was 7 days away I just had to hit it 7 times and bam, I’m there. Comcastic! : )

DVR

The DVR has, at best, only half of the capacity that the Comcast one had. Before, we’d never run out of space. Now, we have to clean it out fairly often. Other than that, the DVR works for the most part.

Customer Service

Yeah, this is what I hated most about Comcast. I am definitely not ‘Comcastic!’ about their customer service. And, like the remote controls, just when I thought customer service couldn’t get worse, Verizon gives Comcast a run for the money! Analyzing/discussing the quality level between Comcast and Verizon’s customer service is like debating morality amongst prostitutes, so I’ll leave it at that. They both suck. Of course, I had some extra holes in my basement walls from the moron that FIOS sent out to install the service and run the cables. They at least eventually made it somewhat right and patched it. They had to come back multiple times to get it done, and I’ll have to touch-up paint it. Morons.

Cost

They both charge way too much.

Internet

The Comcast internet service is laggy at times, which is a big problem if you play Battlefield Heroes like me, the QOS is bad, which is a big problem if you have a 3rd-party VOIP service like I have, and the speed is not what they claim it to be. Verizon FIOS kicks ass in the internet department. I’ve not had a single outage, have not had to reboot a router once, have never experienced any lag, and my Tmobile@Home service has been rock-solid and not a single issue since I moved to FIOS.

Summary

Both of these companies suck ass and treat their customers like garbage. Because my wife/kids watch a lot of TV I’d probably switch back to Comcast if I could (I’m in a 2-year deal with Verizon). But I’d hate to give up the internet service.

Anyways – if you happen to be attending too and want to catch a drink or chat shoot me an email. Otherwise, I’ll be the guy at the Marriott Courtyard bar every night (if they even have a bar : )!

As much as I hate to say it, for me, at least for now, the right choice is Windows XP. I never *hated* Windows XP. I just never liked it. What’s to like? It’s ugly, and like every other operating system from Microsoft, it just seems to suffer from ‘Windows Rot’ – where it just gets slower and slower with each passing bootup. That said, XP is light years ahead of Windows 98. And sorry fellow geeks, but Windows 2000 was never a real contender for a desktop user. Not when 70% of the 3rd-party device manufacturers won’t even write drivers for it.

So, what brought me back to XP? Well…here’s the story:

About 6 years or so ago I was running Windows XP and caught wind of this linux thing. So I looked around, didn’t like the goofy “Redhat Network”/subscription thing, and eventually settled on trying SuSe linux. SuSe was really polished and there was a lot to like about it, but I struggled with constant software dependency problems. After a few months of it I gave up and went back to Windows XP.

A few years later and my XP box is getting slower and slower. One night, even though I have always loathed the thought of paying the Apple tax, I went out and picked up a Mac Mini. For less than $500, I figured I couldn’t go wrong. And in some ways, it was a very cool little machine. But, contrary to what Apple said at the time, it didn’t work with my monitor (way dim and fuzzy), and of course right after I buy my Mini I find out that Steve Jobs is going to announce a new Mini line in a couple of months. I pimped out the Mini – upgraded RAM (OS X is a major memory hog – without 2gb it’s on the slow side), and a firewire external boot drive to speed the thing up. In the end I wound up having to spend $900 just to have a machine that was tolerable, speed-wise. I loved OS X, even though it still had some quirks. It is the best OS out there, bar none. Warts and all. But Apple the company sucks. Everything is expensive. Everything is obsolete the day you walk out of the store with it. Etc.

After having the Mini for a few months and deciding I really liked it and could live without a Windows PC, I planned on buying a new iMac which was set to be unveiled by Steve Jobs at one of Apple’s conferences. So the week before that I put the Mini on ebay. I wound up selling it for almost as much as I paid for it, and planned on putting the money towards an iMac.

But a funny thing happened. I had put what I considered a slightly high ‘Buy It Now’ price on the auction or the Mini, because I didn’t really care to sell it too quickly since I’d be out of a computer until the new iMacs were available. Sure enough, it sold within an hour or two of putting it on Ebay.

So, I pulled out the old PC and decided to give a new linux distro named Ubuntu a try. It was really gaining popularity at the time. And for good reason – it just felt *right* and was/is a great distribution. I wound up sticking with that OS for close to a year, though I had to keep a partition/dual-boot situation with Win XP in order to have access to Microsoft Money (there is to this day no decent personal finance software for the Mac OR linux….Quicken on the Mac? garbage. GnuCash? please.).

But eventually my freelance business started picking up, and my interest in the Flash platform grew and, at that time, before the Flex SDK hit the market, there was no way around it – either you needed a Mac or a Windows PC to create Flash apps. Apple was still too pricey, and I needed a new faster machine as my then 6 year old PC was getting awfully long in the tooth, so I bought a new machine that, you guessed it, came with Windows XP and also the promise of a free upgrade to Vista when it came out.

I stuck with XP for a number of months until I got daring and tried the Vista upgrade. Much to my shock, the upgrade went fine (I actually did a clean install), all my hardware was recognized, and everything worked fine. Unfortunately though, over time the thing got slower and slower. And the file explorer in Vista is utter trash. Why they took away the button to navigate UP one level in a directory tree is unexplicable. Not to mention the mixer/sound management in Vista is horrible.

So, I gave it up and tried the latest edition of Ubuntu, named Ibex/8.10. Unfortunately it doesn’t like my hardware, which is:

• AMD x64 5600+
• 4GB DDR2 RAM
• BioStar A770 A2+ board
• Nvidia GeForce 8600GT 512m

I get constant errors and it is overall kind of slow, given the hardware.

So, after not using it at home for more than a year, I’m back on XP. It works. It’s quick (for now). I’ll give it a few months and see how it work.

Well…..first off….kudos to Verizon for now seemlessly offering ‘dry loop DSL’ (ie, where you can get DSL without landline service). But with that was also a pretty big price increase – from the $29.95 per month I was paying, to $41.95 per month. I decided to ask around, including the great folks who frequent the PANMA listserv, in regards to their experiences with Comcast broadband and whether the speeds they advertise are really truthful. After getting virtually all positive responses, I went for it and picked up a cable modem from my local Comcast office.

Before I get to the results I want to mention some history between myself and Comcast. About 8 years ago, when I first moved into my current home, I signed up for the @home broadband service (not to be confused with the new TMobile@Home….the ‘@home’ broadband I’m referring to was basically the first broadband available in my area…they turned out to be one of those dotcom busts even with the huge infusion of cash via an IPO). I had that service for about 18 months. Back then, I played lots of online multiplayer games, particularly MOHAA (the first one!). So lag and constant speed was important. The @home service was TERRIBLE. It was really laggy, and worse, it would drop for hours at a time. No internet. Or sometimes it would just be no email for 5 minutes here, 3 hours there, etc. Really annoying.

Then, Comcast bought them. The service did get better. Much better. But it was still real unreliable. Then, Verizon offered DSL for much cheaper, so I jumped ship. I’ve had DSL since then and can’t remember a single outage other than one time when it went down for a day (and IIRC, it was just email that went down). Verizon credited us proactively.

So I was leery about going to Comcast broadband again. But it’s supposedly reliable now, and after having it a few days (for what that’s worth…not much) it’s been solid. For just a couple of dollars more than the cost of keeping the DSL service from Verizon, I’m getting a HUGE bandwidth increase, and quite frankly I’m regretting I didn’t make the switch a couple of years sooner.

What is the speed difference? Well, the Verizon DSL was rated at, I believe, 768kbps. To their credit, I consistently got 2.8mbps down, and 350kbps up. The Comcast service is rated at 6mbps down. The speed tests vary with the Comcast service, but I’ve not seen it go below 7mbps yet. In fact, amazingly, it usually is in the 25mbps range!

As you can see from the screenshots above, there is no contest. The Comcast broadband test was done while my wife was upstairs surfing wirelessly or else I would have expected it to be in the mid-20mb range. It’s that much of a difference in speed between it and the DSL. Also, I’m not sure if I have the ‘Comcast Speedboost’ upgrade or not.

So…my point? DSL is a bad value now. Unfortunately FIOS is not available in my area, but unless it can guarantee me a steady bandwidth of greater than 20mbps down, and the cost is equivalent to the Comcast service, then I’ll be sticking with this for a while.

I can’t believe I’m a Comcast fanboy all of sudden.

I wanted to give a half-thumbs up to Tmobile’s customer service, and a full thumbs-up to Verizon’s. Yesterday afternoon I called Tmobile to begin the process of porting my Verizon-based landline number to the @Home service. It took me 3 calls to get to the person who could actually do the porting. The first time I called I got a lady who told me she couldn’t do it (even though the automated ‘how can I help you?’ voice asked me what I needed done, and I told it that I wanted to ‘port a number’, and it correctly responded by repeating what I wanted to do). So the lady doesn’t transfer me, she gives me a phone number to call. An 800 number that, it turns out, is disconnected!

So I call back and this time I get transferred….and after a few seconds I got hung up on. So I call back and the third time I get a friendly fellow who I explained what I was trying to do. He apologized profusely and said he could take care of the porting for me. I explained the situation – that I currently have Verizon DSL and phone, and I want to port my landline phone @ to @Home. A bell went off in my  head as I explained it to him, and before I could say, “Oh Shit!” to myself, he said to me – “Sir, I’m happy to port your number but if we do you may lose your DSL and, with it, your new @Home service will be useless!”

Amazingly, I completely forgot about this little detail : ( It is was kept me from trying Vonage all these years.

So I do some googling and find out about something called “dry loop DSL” – where you can get DSL without having to have a landline number. But every single shred of info on it on the web was a blog post from people complaining that Verizon either was telling them it wasn’t possible but was, or that it would be difficult to get them to agree to do it. I was prepared to dump Verizon DSL and go with, ugh, Comcast broadband (I may still do it….see below why).  So, with much trepidation, I called Verizon and explained the situation. To my surprise, the Verizon rep said to me (paraphrased): “Not a problem sir. What you’re trying to do is called dry loop DSL and we can do that for you. Hold on and let me verify that it will automatically switch over for you.” I had not mentioned the term ‘dry loop’ thinking I’d get someone who would have no clue. But this guy had a clue and was cool. He checked with his superiors to ensure that, once my phone number was ported, that I would automatically be switched to a dry loop dsl line, and they said yes that I’m all set.

So, in 6 to 10 days I’ll be switched over to @Home fully and will be better able to evaluate the service.

The one downside to ‘dry loop dsl’ is that my DSL bill is going up $12 to $41.95 per month, which sucks. I get a rock-solid 2.8mbps down and 700kbps up through this DSL service that I’ve had for about 5 years now. I originally had Comcast cable broadband when I moved into my current house and it was terrible – constant lag/drops, and even full days at a time with no email or, worse, no internet access at all. I finally got fed up and switched to Verizon DSL and have loved it – I can only remember one outage and it was for about 8 hours one day, and they proactively credited us for it. Comcast would do no such thing.

But now, Comcast is offering an ‘up to 6mbps’ broadband deal currently for $19.95 for 6 months, and then $42.95. Also, they’re offering $42.95 off the bat (ie, no discount for 6 months) for their alleged 12mbps service. If I was confident that I’d actually get those results and the service would be reliable, I’d go for it in a heartbeat.  But I do a lot of work from home as a web developer and the last thing I can tell my clients is, “Sorry I didn’t get that file to you faster – my internet was down…” when they’re looking to me to help them with server setups and the like! If anyone has any opinion on Comcast broadband in the Southeastern Pennsylvania area, I’d love to hear it.

11/02/2008 NOTE: After I originally wrote this post a few months ago, T-Mobile linked to it from their t-mobileathome.com site. This has resulted in a huge number of emails/comments on the posts I’ve written about the service. While I appreciate T-Mobile linking to my blog, as all the links/hits I get drives traffic to my site and the small (very small) amount of money I make from the clicked-on ads and such help defray server costs, I want to make it clear that I have no affiliation with T-Mobile whatsoever and receive nothing from them (and never have), other than the services I’ve paid for.

I usually don’t mix personal posts on this blog, but it’s the only blog I have right now going, and well, this is a topic that people are really interested in it seems. There are very few folks who have actually signed up for the new Tmobile@Home service (I’m guessing this because so few people have info on the web about it). So, in the interest of sharing info back to the web community….here I go…

Yesterday afternoon I went to my local Tmobile store to sign up for the @Home service. I am currently paying over $60 per month for my Verizon landline, so I figured if I could get 99% up-time from this new @Home service for just $10 per month, it would be worth it. So I signed up, which took a while because, as I soon found out after saying to the sales guy, “Sign me up!”, that I in fact was the first person at that store to sign up for the service.

I have had Tmobile cell service for about 1.5 years now and have liked the service. The website is great and they seem to be on the up-and-up, so I took a calculated risk.

So, here’s the scoop:

Costs:

~$35 activation fee for the new phone number/line

My sales rep failed to mention this fee, which pisses me off but, quite frankly, I would have agreed to it anyway.

~$50 for a LinkSys router. I’ll post more details on the router later, but that is the one thing about the @Home service that there is a good bit of info on the net on.  I was using a D-Link Wireless router that had ‘Draft N’ status, so downgrading from the 802.11N to 802.11G was something I was disappointed with. Supposedly you can just connect both routers (and I have a 4-port switch laying around doing nothing to facilitate this) or chain them to the broadband source, but quite frankly I didn’t want to mess around with that. At least not during this ‘trial’ period. And besides, my wife is the only one who uses the wireless currently at my house and she’s using Ubuntu on her laptop with a wireless G card, so the N was going to waste anyway. The range of the D-Link wasn’t all that great either, so I figured I’d go with the LinkSys. Speeds seem no different to her after the switch. I can tell you that the ’strength’ level of the wireless signal coming from the D-Link was ~34% usually, whereas the signal level from the Tmobile Linksys was just over 50% yesterday. So that was better at least.

The router certainly is much more aesthetically pleasing too : ) It has lots of lights and is cool-looking, for what that’s worth (nothing). I’ve been running it since yesterday and no drops, no problems. It has 4 ethernet ports and 2 landline ports for you to hookup your phones. Any phone can be hooked up to it (well, I suppose rotary phones can’t). I hooked up an old wireless phone base/handset that I had in my basement to it (more about why below) and it worked flawlessly. Sound quality was great and it works just like a regular phone – when you pick it up you even hear a dial-tone like a regular landline phone. I walked upstairs to my bedroom, which is at the farthest point in my house from the router, which is in my new ‘family room’ (that’s code for our recently finished basement!), and the sound quality and volume level did not change. I was worried about that and was pleasantly surprised.

Some folks on the Broadband Reports website forum, which to date is the only decent source of info I could find about this service prior to buying it, have asked me to check if the outgoing caller ID lists my name when I call another landline from the @Home phone. I’ll try that tonight and report back with a new post here.

My current landline is with Verizon, and I use Verizon DSL. I have loved the DSL (I had Comcast broadband for a couple of years, which sucked – major lag/variance in bandwidth) and have had a solid connection with no downtime for about 5 years now. 1.5mb down steady. Maybe more now, haven’t checked in a while. I am going to run some tests using the @Home service and downloading a torrent or other large file at the same time to see how things are affected. If anyone has any tips/suggestions on how to best run some valid ‘tests’ I’d love to hear them.

Well, so far I’m happy. But I’ll tell you this: I haven’t initiated the porting of my current landline number yet. I’m gonna wait one more day then start the process, which supposedly takes at least 6 days, if not 10.

My main hurdle at this point is my telephones.  I have 3 ‘levels’ to my house – the basement, main floor, and upstairs. Since the basement was recently finished, I didn’t get a new phone for down there so I’ve been ‘phoneless’ down there from a landline perspective. In our living room is a great Motorla wireless base/handset that my wife won in some contest, and upstairs is a piece of garbage $9 phone. My problem is this: my @Home router is on my computer desk in my basement. I am not going to re-rig phone lines around so that I can plug the Motorola from my living room into the router, and since I want to get a new phone base with 2 handsets anyway so all 3 floors can be covered, I’m going to stop at the Tmobile store to investigate the VTech phones they are selling. IIRC, for about $100 I can get the base and 2 handsets. The key concer/question for me is this: if I set the base up on my PC desk in the basement,  no one will be able to see whether a new voicemail has arrived unless the handsets have some sort of flashing indicator on them. Hopefully they do. If not, I’ll have to find a set of phones that do work that way. And if that won’t work, I’ll re-think the setup of the @Home wiring. I can do it, I’m just too busy to do that these days. Also, allegedly, TMobile claims that the VTECH phones they are recommending/selling also include some special features/buttons specific to the @Home service. So, we’ll see. I’ll report back.

UPDATE 07.17.08: I’m noticing that many folks are coming directly to this post via the TMobile@Home website (which has linked directly to this post).

Please note that I have added some more posts regarding the @home service. Click here to view them.

The purpose of this blog is to post tips, thoughts, reviews, frustrations, etc. that are in some way related to the world of learning. Most likely elearning. Enjoy and please leave comments. The more feedback I get the more inclined I’ll be to spend as much time as possible on updating this blog.