Worse than cablevision?

My name is Andrew and I am the current President of the Board of 616 East 18th street. Thank you for posting our progress in getting Fios into our building. I’m sure many buildings in the neighborhood are interested in our progress, and we, in turn, were spurred into action when we heard that our neighbor 601 East 18th Street had already had Fios conduit run throughout their building many months ago now.

There is likely to be no end to the Cablevision vs. Fios debate that has already begun here in the comments section. It may be like PC vs. Mac in that there will be die-hard supporters of each, and everyone else will fall somewhere in between. In my personal experience, and with my knowledge of this technology from my years at NYU Film School, Cablevision has the fastest average internet speeds in the country (lucky us), but Fios should have a cleaner picture quality on their TV service due to the larger bandwith of fiber-optic and the reduced need to compress the video image.

As a board president, what seems more important than the debate about which company or service is better, is the idea that our building should have competition between cable/phone/internet providers for the first time in history and our residents should therefore benefit from having an individual choice of provider.

For as long as these two companies are embroiled in a competitive price-war, it is likely to be all of us, the end users, who reap the benefit, regardless of our choice.

The installation itself requires contacting the multi-dwelling-unit part of Fios and getting on their queue. They are currently offering free installation of their cable and conduit throughout the entire building. DirectTV wanted to charge us $8,000 for the privilege of letting them install their cables so that our residents could have a choice of cable or satellite from a single dish array on the roof, and we balked at the up-front cost.

Once you get Fios to survey your building, they eventually run their cable from a man-hole to the building via a thin trench, then to the nearest utility pole (usually in the back yard or courtyard) and then they do the in-building installation. They provide crown-molding-style cable-track (plastic) to beautify the hallways while running their cable along the walls near the ceiling, and they’re willing to play nice with the existing cablevision track that a lot of our buildings already have.

I have been told that our neighborhood sits on a dividing line between an Ocean Avenue fiber-optic node or main facility (near Ave H) and a Kensington facility. I was told that E 18th Street is near or at the dividing line between these two facilities’ territories, and that the Ocean Avenue facility is months ahead of the Kensington one in terms of the roll-out of fiber-optic. This is what one Fios engineer told me and I have no way of verifying this information. But it made us feel special and/or lucky. If this is good information, it would account for the un-even roll-out of Fiber-optic infrastructure in our neighborhood so far. If anyone has additional or corroborating information, I encourage them to share it in this comments thread.

Thank you to Ditmas Park Blog for being an invaluable neighborhood resource and for posting an article from my building’s web site for the first time. We started it almost 2 years ago now, with a real “web site committee” and everything, and I feel like this is a big moment in our web site’s internet-life.

My Mother’s gripe with Fios was that she felt they had deceived her. She was lured over from optimum triple play, which was $99 a month flat rate, including taxes. Fios promised better picture color and all that jazz, also for $99 a month. That’s where she felt lied to. She claimes there were little add-ons that added up, she was not planning on and her monthly bill after taxes was $120. When she went to cancel and switch back, she found out she was in a year contract, which she was previously unaware of. Now, admittedly, my mom is not the sharpest tool in the shed(Though I love her so)but Fios caused her a lot of emotional distress and that is why I feel the need to share. Take it of leave it.
I have cable vision, and they suck too, so whatever….

I live in 616, and first have to praise the board — website, FIOS and all sort of efforts and dedication to improve the building.

We all have heard good and bad things from both FIOS and Comcast. In full fairness, Comcast has been much better than Time Warner, which I previously had.

With that said, the great thing is that we’ll have options, and the competition that comes with it. Will give us leverage to negotiate better prices and service.

So long they break even, cable companies will be more accommodating in order to avoid you going to the competition.