Emil's Wicked Cool Blog

Well, the trucks have rolled through the neighborhood laying down fiber optic cable through the streets. While I don't have FIOS yet, it will be installed May 5th. For the uninitiated, the service is high speed brodband Internet access provided by Fiber Optic cable directly to the house. Instead of a cable or DSL modem, what gets installed in your house is an ethernet jack. I like the service for the following reasons:

1. It's fast (15Mb/sec, which is triple the speed of cable service here)
2. It's fast (2Mb/sec upload speed, which is 6 times the speed of cable service here). Why do I care about upload speed? When working from home, talking on Vonage (over the Internet) and sharing applications in Netmeeting becomes painful.
3. It's priced well. For $1 less than my already-discounted broadband cable service, I get the 15Mb/2Mb package. If I were even cheaper than I already am, I could have 5Mb/2Mb service for $10 less. That would give me roughly the same service I have now, but would vastly improve my upload speed.

I may have splurged a bit on the 15Mb package...not sure I'll use all the download speed. But guaranteed, it will be nice.

As an aside, the power of marketing and brand recognition is really evident in this space. I could pay 3x as much with Comcast (or Verizon) for the same service I get from Vonage. Verizon FIOS is very new, so they are priced so well that there's just no reason to switch. Either you get better service for the same price (like me), or you save $10/month. With 1 month free and a 30 day money back guarantee, there is no customer switching costs. It will be interesting to see how Comcast reacts to the competitive threat when FIOS starts getting mindshare...