As it seems like I am pretty much every other month these days, I’m up in the air once again entertaining the idea of switching over from cable to FiOS.
It’s mainly the money that’s got me curious this time – I know that I’ve bitched in the past about promotional pricing being a giant racket, but we’re paying an embarrassingly obscene amount for cable these days … the service arguably hasn’t really even improved (more so worsened, if you ask my wife!) and yet their prices continue to inch up a la inflation like just about everything else except my income, so I guess I’m just at the breaking point where I feel like something’s gotta give!
P.S. It also probably helped that while visiting one of Sara’s friends last night, I got a chance to finally see the FiOS TV interface for myself and wow, does it just look so much better than the clunky, spreadsheet-esque guide that our cable company is still drudging us through! I saw a handful of features right off the bat that just seemed really smart – stuff like better organization of recorded programs and pretty station logos you can browse for the different channels – and it made me feel a little better about considering the switch because one of my biggest fears has always been going through all of the hassle of changing over, only to find that the experience is a) virtually identical, and b) 6-months in, actually costing me more than cable had before I jumped ship…
Thankfully, it looks like Verizon finally got it in gear and re-wrote their checkout system to better spell out what to expect of their promotional pricing, so maybe this won’t be so bad after all.
Even after trimming off a couple of unneeded channels from our cable package first, the year #2 price for FiOS is still about $10 cheaper than what we’re paying for cable now, and you can see for that first year it’s more in the neighborhood of a $30/month discount, which would be kinda nice! My wife is eager to switch literally tomorrow because she just despises that the on-demand channels never seem to work with cable for her. I myself see it a little more lax because I hardly watch any TV at all right now, although we have been having ongoing issues with our router and I’m pretty sure we get a fancy, new one with FiOS so that might be my incentive to make the switch.
Everybody who I talk to about FiOS says that once they got it installed, they’ve never even looked back, and I was even excited about it myself when it was first announced … I just found myself gradually soured when Verizon completely failed at their attempt to install it in my apartment about five years ago. But maybe it’s time to give it another try – clearly they’ve done a lot of installs between now and then, and no apartment means no crumbling walls this time to have to deal with … plus, it might be nice to actually use HBO On-Demand at 2am instead of seeing Bright House’s clear as mud Error 1 – Try Again Later when all I want is a little Curb before drifting off to Never Never Land! 🙂