not fair!

[cellio]

Today a friend (less technical than I), who lives about three-quarters of a mile from me, asked me which is better for internet: Comcast or Verizon FiOS.

I've been waiting for FiOS to reach my street for years -- and, according to Verizon's "what's available at your address" page, I'm still waiting.

*Sigh*

Comments

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

No, not very fair.

Not that you asked on behalf of your friend, but for what it's worth, I've had both. (and then Verizon sold their Washington & Oregon businesses to Frontier.net a while back, so now we have Frontier.) I can tell you that I dislike Comcast.

For one thing, they use scare tactics in their local advertising, which makes them look very scummy indeed.

But worse, they apparently do a poor job at controlling spammers. So when you send email from a computer that gets its IP address from Comcast, other ISPs notice that the mail in question is coming from a range of IP addresses from which spam often originates. And they block your email, even though the mail was not spam at all.

During the year or two that Comcast was our ISP, I had to fight this particular battle constantly. Very annoying. The moment we switched from Comcast to Verizon, I never again got email saying that my email was rejected because it came from an undesirable IP address.

I would have to be extremely desperate before I ever consider going back to Comcast.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Verizon is being notoriously slow about expanding FiOS. It may be that they are having difficulty expanding their back-end capacity; I don't know.

Disclaimer: the following applies to the DC FedroSplat and environs, and I don't know if Pittsburgh is having the same experience. That said, we've had FiOS for nearly six years now. From the experiences we've had, that other friends with FiOS have had, and that friends with Comcast have had -- FiOS wins hands down. Verizon's customer service (for FiOS anyway) isn't too bad, whereas Comcast has pretty much earned every piece of opprobrium they get; and FiOS's uptime rate is tons better than ComCrap's.

[geekosaur]

FiOS never gave me problems (and averaged one short outage per year) and was much faster than anything I could get from Comcast. That said, the evidence suggests they're not expanding any time soon. :/