I would think that FIOS would be a good alternative. They are the upstart, working hard to gain market share and so on, right? Apparently not. I'm not sure why, but they are not willing to provide me a bundle that is a lower price than Cox. In face, when I price it out, the price is exactly the same. Here's the scoop:
FIOS:
The key problem here is that you need to pay monthly for a set top receiver for every TV that you use. This is problematic when you have up to six TVs that you'd want to be able to get service. The following assumes that we only hook up three TVs: HD on the big TV and the master bedroom and SD TV on one other. This adds $26/month to the cost of the service. Outrageous - especially since Cox doesn't require a box for any connection. And, we can get HD on our TVs without any box (so, its not just SD TVs that this works for).
Sadly, this setup doesn't even include a DVR (which we currently have with Cox). Note that I haven't done a channel-by-channel review to see what service has what. Both include the core channels that I care about: the networks, ESPN, USA and SyFy. I don't really think that there are too many others.
FIOS requires a year-long commitment and will guarantee your price for two years. So the bottom line price (before taxes) is $120 per month.
Here's a picture of how Verizon separates out the various charges:
Cox:
Cox's bill is broken out like the following:
It is worth noting that the Cox bill is before the $12/month discount that Cox extended to me for agreeing to a year-long term (the same terms that Verizon is seeking).
Conclusion:
Its always easier to do nothing (i.e., not change service) and I think that's what I'll be doing. A potentially, slightly faster internet connection is not sufficiently interesting to mess with the switchover.
The $150 incentive that Verizon is throwing out there to switch is not sufficient to cover my switching costs, which I consider to be the following:
- Overlapping service: I won't switch off my current internet service until I'm convinced that my new service is working reliably and the way that I want.
- Tearing up of my "lawn". OK, so it may not be the greenest and densest lawn in all of Northern Virginia, but I still don't want to have to deal with the installation.
- Uncertainty: I may have missed something in my analysis. The FIOS service could be lacking in a way that I'm not comfortable with.
- Flexibility with TVs: with FIOS I have to pay extra for every single additional TV that I might want to have hooked up. Not something I'm OK with doing, even though I don't have plans to do so and despite the fact that my kids watch more TV programming on their computers than on TVs
