Marcelo Calbucci

Last week we’ve made the switch from Comcast TV & Internet to Verizon FIOS. The primary trigger for the switch was price. Comcast raised our prices beyond what we thought was reasonable, so we decided to give Verizon FIOS a try and get the bundled Internet, TV & Phone. Turns out the price is about the same, for a slightly better Internet speed. But not everything is the same. Here are a few differences.


Internet Speed: Comcast offers 8 Mbps at my house (with their PowerBoost of up to 12Mbps), and FIOS starts at 15Mbps. I could actually go with 25Mbps on FIOS if I needed. Upload is also a win for Verizon, since right now I’m getting 5 Mbps and Comcast offers 3Mbps, but I could upgrade my Verizon to 25Mbps of upload speed!!!!

Dynamic IP: For the geeks out there, Verizon is much more aggressive with changing your IP address to make it harder for you to use a Dynamic DNS service and host a server at your house. I’ve noticed Verizon changes my IP about every day. Comcast wasn’t as aggressive. This is somewhat of a problem for me because I use IP-blocking on my servers to make sure only my house has access to certain ports & services on my servers on a data-center.

Port 25: This one is very annoying, but Verizon actually blocks traffic on Port 25. If you don’t know what this is, you probably shouldn’t care.

Internet Outage: Surprise! Less than 48 hours after we first got Verizon FIOS there was an Internet outage. It lasted about 10 hours and it took us hours of investigations and phone calls to talk to a representative for him to tell us it was a city-wide issue. As far as I can remember we had one Comcast outage in 2 years of using their service and it lasted just a couple of hours. This could be just bad timing and Verizion won’t have another outage for another 2 years, or it could be their infrastructure is not good and we are set for a bumpy ride.

Customer Service: Comcast rocks, Verizon sucks. Period. Verizon is a very dysfunctional company. If you have an issue or a question expect to wait a long time on the line and be bounced back-and-forth between customers rep. Comcast is the opposite. From phone to the Comcast store to social media, Comcast gets it and does it right.

Price: Well, turns out that price-wise we’ll be paying about the same thing, but with slightly higher Internet speed and more channels. However, we have not received our first FIOS bill yet, and Cable/Phone companies can always surprise you with the extra stuff.

TV Channels: Verizon is much better than Comcast. Our current package has more channels and they have what seems to be a wider variety of channels.

Remote control: It takes time to get used to a new Remote, but I’m liking the Verizon Remote Control more than Comcast. It has more buttons, but somehow they make sense and are easy to use. The one thing I don’t like is that Comcast had a “Power All” button that would turn on/off the Set-top-box & TV with a single click. On Verizon it requires 3-clicks to turn off the TV & STB.

Set-Top-Box & DVR: The STB is physically identical (both made by Motorola), but Verizon is way, way, way better on many aspects. First of all, it’s way faster and more responsive. Comcast STB is as stupid as it can be. It gives you useless messages and make you go through weird choices. Verizon STB & DVR offers a lot more, including the ability to share DVR recordings across rooms (it’s not working for us yet, but I’ll figure out), control your DVR from the Web or Phone, etc. The design and experience of the STB/DVR is much better, elegant and well thought out than Comcast and they even have integration with Facebook, Twitter, ESPN Fantasy Football and a lot more. Amazingly cool (and geek)!

Channels Order: My TV viewing habits are about to change forever. I’ve been using Comcast for the last 12 years and got used to the channels # and order. I noticed that because some channels are in different order I don’t watch them anymore, or watch new ones. I think Verizon FIOS is really bad for FOX News, because it’s not close to CNN/CNBC/MSNBC anymore.

That’s it for now.