Verizon FIOS Internet Service

Verizon FIOS Internet service allows you to connect your home directly to Verizon's fiber-optic network to get what I think is some incredibly fast and reliable service.

After almost three and a half years of service I really haven't had any with the Internet service itself and the only serious problem I had was that my first router died and I had to have a new one shipped out and then I had to set it up.

FIOS service lets you bring Verizon's fiber optic cables directly to your house. On the outside of your house is a converter box which converts the signals on the fiber optic lines to the more traditional signals to travel through your house and the wiring that they put in. These FIOS lines can carry Internet service, telephone service and TV services. In my case I have all three, but you can have any combination you want installed. We started out with the Internet and phone service since the TV wasn't available when we first moved into our new home. Since then the TV services have become available and we've had those installed too.

The installation can be a fairly long process since a new line needs to be strung to your house and the the equipment needs to be installed and set up. In our case, it took the Verizon tech about five hours from the time he got there till the time that our telephone and Internet were up and running. One thing to note with the FIOS service is that once you have converted your Internet service and telephone service over to the FIOS system, they require electricity to run. There's a battery backup on the equipment that will provide a few hours of phone service if the power goes out, but after that, you won't have any phone service.

Billing is fairly simple. Verizon has three different levels of speeds available and each are billed at different amounts. I currently have the 2nd level speed since it came as part of a package, but I started with the slowest speed, which was still faster than Comcast and I didn't see a need to upgrade except that it turned out to be cheaper in the package versus what I was doing at that point.

I have found the reliability of my FIOS Internet service surpasses anything I ever had with a cable company. I haven't had to worry about losing the service in storms and I also find that while I'm on the Internet, it just runs better than other Internet services that I've had.

The only problem I had turned out to not even be with the actual service, instead the included wireless router failed after about a year and a half of using it. I called customer service which took a bit of time as I had to deal with their computerized help system. When I finally did talk to a person, they troubleshooted the router and found that it was broken and sent me the replacement. When it arrived, I had to reinstall it and had to call them to reinitialize it, which the included instructions didn't say, so I was a bit frustrated.

Besides that bad customer service experience, my interactions with the customer service have actually been good. When I first called to have the service set up I talked to a really helpful person and then more recently I called again seeing if there were ways I could reduce my costs and they suggested the bundle that was available, which has saved me about $30 a month.

In the end...

I am very happy with my Verizon FIOS Internet service and I honestly wouldn't trade it for any other service at the moment.