Verizon FiOS HDTV - Page 576

Looks like Fox Soccer channel may be converted to FX2, (see Hot Off the Press)

i wonder if Version will simply dump the channel, then pick it up years later ?

Ah yes I am using the "FiOS Mobile" app on the iPad. I called it by the old name in my post.

So I just signed a 2 year contract online and am in the 30 day back out period. I didn't call to see if I could get a better deal. Should I call now and tell them I don't want the 2 year deal? Seems most here are calling to get the best deals.

The FiOS app for live TV on the iPad works great for me... no problems whatsoever. There is no On Demand content for the iPad app yet but that is fine with me, I hate On Demand. I would love for a future update to allow a user to watch DVR recorded programs on the iPad though.

My issue is with the iPhone app. I somehow cannot schedule DVR recordings anymore with my iPhone even while it can still be used as a remote. It is frustrating to me but not worth the time and effort to contact a support team to try to get it fixed.

Depends. Would you be calling to try to get a better deal on your base package, or on premium channels and/or equipment? If you want to get half off things like HBO/Cinemax, Epix, Starz/Encore, I've found a phone call works. I've never tried to renegotiate the base package though, (during my contract period) since it was pretty low to begin with.

Just a warning for anyone renewing his/her contract and switching to digital voice:

It requires a new account number. The last bill under the old contract has to be paid manually. Looking online, it will state that your automatic payment will be taken, but it won't. I called Vz and was straightened out. The rep couldn't even see my last bill; she only had access to the new account info until she put me on hold and talked to someone else. After that, she was able to tell me that we have to manually pay the last bill. She apologized for the error online, but it doesn't seem like it'll be fixed.

I might get more action in here so if you guys could, help me out a bit. Basically im happy with Dish Network, i think the PQ is really good and ive enjoyed it for a handful of years now. But since Fios is finally here for me, im thinking of switching out. Now the internet for me is pretty much a no brainer, but i need to know what are the pros and cons to fios that maybe you guys have run into.

Which bundle do most of you have?

You should do a comparison of the channels available on FIOS vs. Dish, just so you can make sure that FIOS has the channels that you care about in HD. Right now FIOS is sort of bandwidth-starved and is missing some HD channels that some folks care about (though they DO have most of the major ones).

You'll actually get more action in the DSL Reports FiOS forums. It's pretty sleepy around here in comparison.

I've never had Dish, but have had DirecTV & Comcast and overall FiOS outshines them all. We've had it going on three years now. However, it's very important to remember, that's for our specific needs. There are indeed drawbacks. Three that immediately pop into mind are hardware, sports programming & customer service.

-- While the most recent FiOS DVR - the Motorola 7232 - comes with a 500 GB drive and can be expanded with an external drive, there's no guarantee you'll get that model. And, quite frankly, the FiOS DVRs are a bit lacking for some people. We're fine with them. They're fast (even faster following a recent software update) and responsive 99.9 percent of the time. The Multi-Room DVR functions near flawlessly as well. However, it's $16.99 per DVR (where I am) and $6.99 per HD STB. That can be steep. And unlike the most recent Dish and DirecTV models, it maxes out at two tuners. (Now, the Media Server with four or five tuners for FiOS is said to be "coming soon," but that could mean anything.)

-- Coming from Dish, FiOS lack of sports programming probably won't bother you. However, unlike DirecTV, the sports subscriptions are lacking in overall HD and choices. You'll have to look closely at that.

-- Customer service is hit-and-miss. People have run into billing issues and other difficulties that take an inordinate amount of time to straighten out. (Knock wood) we've been lucky on that end.

There's a lot of good with FiOS. Especially in those first couple years when you get really good triple play deals. Sometimes, you can also get them to cut prices on HBO and other premium channels like Epix and Starz if you ask. Even the website - which was a nightmare for a bit - has gotten better the last few months. I think only DirecTV compares to FiOS from a TV standpoint quite honestly. Oh and we have the Ultimate HD tier. In the NY-NJ area it's quite a bargain with all the premium channels included.

There are other people who know a lot more of the technical aspects regarding FiOS. Things like QAM space, MPEG-4 vs. MPEG-2 - things that are well above my pay grade. They'll gladly fill you in on the tech-speak if you need it. Good luck.
Edited by sangs - 1/23/13 at 3:21am

I just did exactly the same thing, but in reverse: I had FiOS double play (internet & phone only), and used Dish Network for TV. I decided to add the TV service after actually answering one of the 10 zillion telesales calls I receive every month from Verizon, but then started wondering if the bundle pricing I received was as good as I'd get by either calling in myself and/or doing a self-serve transaction on the website.

I ended up having to cancel the entire pending order in order to even research the online alternatives, because the VZW website will not allow you to even view package options and pricing if you have any kind of uncompleted order. It took three phone calls over two days just to do the cancellation and to finally get the website to reflect that the order had indeed been cancelled.

What I learned:

• Shopping for Verizon FioS is a lot like trying to find the best price on an airline seat: There are tons of different offers floating around, and completely different packages are offered on the VZW website vs. what you can get from telesales or by calling in. One of the VZW customer service folks verified this for me, admitting that promotional pricing on the website is often different - in fact, the telephone salespeople generally don't even know if their current pricing is lower or higher than what you'd get by doing it yourself on the website.
• Naturally, the packages for totally new customers (ie, having no FiOS services at all) are different from (and usually better than) the upgrade bundles offered if you already subscribe to one or more of the other FiOS services. But at least in my case, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the 'penalty' for being an existing subscriber wasn't all that much - perhaps $50 more in total over the 24 month period vs. being an "all-new" customer.
• Don't be swayed by what may appear to be great offers that include things like a 'free' $250 or $500 Visa gift card! In my case, every offer that included a gift card ended up being more expensive overall.
• The only way to really compare apples to apples is to calculate the total cost for the bundled services you want over each month of the entire two-year contract period, since most of the monthly discounts don't apply to the entire term. Be sure to subtract from that total the value of any included Visa gift card.

Bottom line: In my case, placing my order directly on the website saved me a total of something like $350 over 24 months compared to the "great deal" the pushy telesales guy was offering which included a $250 gift card. That's an average savings of about $14.50 per month over the 24-month contract term!

So the answer is yes, it's definitely worth shopping each of the various channels and comparing prices to get the best overall deal at any moment in time.

In my case, when I renewed last year and got the $300 gift card it was the best deal. I had cellular, ultimate Hd and internet. I was able to add digital voice and my monthly bill with all four services was lower than when I had three services, plus I got the $300 gift card on top of that.

I've had Dish Network for almost 15 years now, and I've always been very happy. Dish probably considered me to be a perfect customer, because I subscribed to almost every premium channel they offer and required very little tech support. But this year, they hiked my price up about $6/month, which put my total over $150/month. That pushed me past the breaking point to where I could no longer ignore the big cost savings of adding FiOS TV (Ultimate HD) to my existing FiOS double-play bundle, and I made the switch.

The answer to your "pros and cons" question will depend a lot on your own situation, what Dish equipment you currently have, etc. You've already had great advice in terms of carefully comparing the channel charts for Dish vs. FiOS. For me, it was basically a wash: I lost a few channels that only Dish carried (like the SuperStations package, Glenn Beck's BlazeTV, and the free Blockbuster on-demand content), and gained a few that only FiOS carried (like the Big 10 Network, because Dish apparently thinks that Big 10 alumni never move outside of the Midwest). I think I had a few more HD stations on Dish, but they were pretty similar for what I usually watch.

The one place where Dish really shines vs. FiOS is equipment. If you've had one of the newer triple-tuner Dish DVRs (never mind the 6-tuner Hopper/Joey combo, which is even better), you'll probably be disappointed with the FiOS gear. In my area, VZW uses only the newest Cisco boxes, and there's just no comparison. Dish DVRs and receivers have always been great, and I'm really going to miss them. Just a few examples: Both the Cisco multi-room DVR and the HD set-top boxes are much more sluggish across the board, including bringing up menus or the guide, skipping +30 or -10 sec during playback, etc. These were all instantaneous on my old Dish 622, but are noticeably laggy on the Cisco boxes - perhaps they have slower processors? I also really miss the simple ability to choose the channel ordering: FiOS has lower numbers at the top of the guide, which increase as you scroll down. Ditto with simply scanning channels with the remote, where the 'down' arrow makes the channel go UP, and vice versa. This is proving very hard to get used to, after 15 years of having it the other way which just seems much more intuitive to me. From the very beginning, Dish boxes have let the user choose between these two approaches; the FiOS gear doesn't.

And the one that's driving me nuts more than anything else is the way stations that have both SD and HD versions are handled. FiOS puts any HD duplicates of SD stations into the 500 range. So for an SD channel at 50, the high-def version (if one exists) will be found way up at 550. This completely messes up channel ordering in favorite lists, the guide, or even just surfing through channels. A great example is the set of Showtime channels. You'll find all the SD versions neatly grouped together, but high-def versions aren't offered for every Showtime channel - and for those that are, they're not in the same area of the lineup. If you create a Favorites list that contains only the high-def versions (whenever both SD and HD are available), you'll end up with sequences of the Showtime channels in different places vs. being all grouped together. (For those that have never used Dish, they simply 'map' all of the HD channels onto the identical channel numbers as the SD versions. When browsing "all channels", you'll find '105 - USA Network' and right above it will be '105 - USA Network (HD)'. So a favorites list that simply removes those SD versions keeps everything together, and just where you'd also find it on an SD box.) I find the FiOS approach really confusing by comparison, even for techies like me... my wife already hates it and wants me to bring back the Dish boxes. So if anyone knows something I'm missing that will improve this with FiOS, I'd sure love to hear it!

Finally, this may not be an issue for you, but I had a setup where the RF outputs of all my Dish receivers (Outputs 1 and 2 from the DVR, as well as the single outputs from two other HD receivers) were combined with an OTA antenna feed, amplified, and then distributed to all the other TVs in the house. That way, older and seldom-used SD sets without ATSC tuners could still view any of the four "house channels", while newer sets could view all of the off-air locals in addition to the four house channels. Since the Dish DVR remotes are UHF (not IR), I just have several extra remotes that can be placed near any of these secondary TVs as needed. There's no extra cost for boxes; any set can watch any channel (HD or SD); and can even view DVR recordings if desired. I'm having a lot of trouble duplicating this with FiOS without paying a fortune for extra set-top boxes. I can add RF to the remotes fairly cheaply, but all of them are on the same frequency so would change all of the boxes at once (Dish remotes and boxes have user-selectable frequencies). Also, I used diplexers to feed the Dish satellite signal to the set top boxes and also to carry the RF output back to a central hub using a single coax cable. That scheme won't work with FiOS receivers because FiOS TV and OTA frequencies overlap, and there's no reasonable way to get another coax line into those rooms.

Overall, though, the FiOS picture quality is superb - every bit as good as Dish if not better. And for a savings of almost $100/month (!) I can either learn to live with the few disappointments or find some way to work around them.

Hope this helps...

I have no idea what the SD channels numbers are. And I only have a vague idea what the HD channel numbers are. I only have a handful of SD channels programmed in as my favorites while the other 97% are HD channels. I personally would not like them to use Sd channel numbers since I'm not as familiar with them. But ultimately it is only a channel number and I don't even know what most of the HD channel numbers are. I borwse the guide by content and not by channel numbers. Comcast did the same thing when I had them. Grouping the HD content together. It's much easier to browse it that way. I prefer it to mapping the HD channels to the SD channel numbers like DirecTV does and I guess also dish

When I got DirecTV in 2001, specifically for their HD content, they did not map the HD channels to the Sd channels. But at that time they only had a handful of channels. And by the time I left them in 2007, they may have been doing it then, but I was using TiVos to watch my HD content then on DirecTV and those, fortunately, did not map the HD channels to the Sd channels. Now, for me, there are just too many channels to keeps track of what the channels numbers are. I do know the local HD channel locations but only a handful of the locations of the national ones.
Edited by aaronwt - 2/5/13 at 5:46am

I understand what rvonder is saying though. I don't watch the SD versions of SHO, so they aren't on my favorites list, but I can see how it would be disjointing and annoying to have all the SHO channels split with no ability to reorder. Same goes for any premiums not offered in HD.

Also, I'm not sure if you're able to specify what DVRs you can receive but I have the Motorolla boxes and I've heard they're generally faster than their Cisco counterparts. I'm pleased with their speed. Never had Dish, but the FiOS boxes are light years faster than the DirecTV ones.

I left Dish for Fios a few years back and have been very happy. I liked Dish but they refused to carry the Yes Network, so I had to have a package from Comcast as well which made sense at the time since they were my internet provider. Once Fios moved in I was able to get everything from one provider. Like some of the other posters I think Dish's equipment is better, especially their receivers/ dvr's that let you record OTA content. I'd give Fios a slight edge in picture quality. Had Directv at one point too. Both Dish and Fios are better inmo.

Dont watch SD.

I just called Verizon and they said that service in my area N county San diego is coming in July so looks like I'll have to wait patiently to switch from Directv. I hope you guys are right about this Fios being better than Dish and Directv.

I've been with them a long, long time but the package Verizon is offering with Tv+internet+cell is very wallet friendly. But the main thing that's making me lean this way is the PQ and HD channels.

Does Verizon have a retention dept.? How do I get to it?

I have an old triple play pkg. I'm no longer under contract. I want to reup but get the best deal possible. What's the best I can do? I'm in SoCal in a TWC area.

They didn't give me a very good deal. I ended up going month to month with them. I think the only real option is to switch and then get their new customer deal to come back. Since I am hopelessly addicted to FIOS internet speeds that isn't very likely for me. Which is probably what they are counting on. It is a premium product that people are willing to pay more for. I did recently get HBO free for 3 months.

I just tried to upgrade my FiOS to Ultimate along with Quantum 50/25 but Verizon won't let me unless I also upgrade my copper landline to FiOS digital. I refuse to do that because an 8 hour back up is not acceptable to me. My parents lost power for days after the northeast blizzard last week so the 8 hour back up was useless.

I know that Verizon would love to get rid of all the copper lines but I won't upgrade to Digital voice. As much as I like FiOS I'm heading to the Comcast site to see what's available. Really pissed off right now....

A couple of thoughts based upon my experience:
1) We had copper, but it came through the FiOS ONT, so we still lost a dial tone during outages. Maybe yours is still completely separate?
2) When we recently renewed, we switched to digital voice, and the sound quality was slightly clearer than copper. Also, the voice mail is more robust, reading out the phone number of the caller.
3) The downside to switching is a new account, w/ the typical labyrinthine billing nightmares, which I'm still waiting to see if they resolve.
4) We switched from 35/35 Internet to 75/35, and I really can't see a difference in download speeds.

Copper from ONT is different than copper via POTS which I believe is what RolandOG has. POTS is powered from the central office and assuming the wiring is up, it will not lose dial tone if power is lost.

Any news on Fios picking up the new BeIN sports channels?

If the generators at the central office go down(or get stolen) the dial tone will still go down. As many people found out in this area last Summer. My parents have been in their current house for over 45 years. The phone has been rock solid that entire time. But last Summer, when we had the Derecho storm roll through the DC area, their landline phone service was down for almost a week. While their neighbors that were on FiOS or Comcast only had their service down for a few hours if at all. Anyone in that area that was on a POTS landline, their phone service was out for many days.
Edited by aaronwt - 2/19/13 at 6:14am

Yes true but batteries on the CO side last longer than than few hours one can get on an ONT. During Sandy some people had POTS while other loss FiOS and vice versa so there are advantages and disadvantages to both.

In OP's case I can understand why he prefers to stay on POTS but at the same time Verizon needs to nudge people in fios areas towards DV so they no longer have to maintain 2 parallel networks.

1) As nyctveng guessed, mine is POTS and completely separate from the FiOS ONT.
2) DV may give me other features but I don't need them, especially at the expense of the copper POTS line.
4) I'm still at 20/5 so I'm expecting to see a difference going to 50/25.


I completely understand that Verizon wants the POTS system gone and that people like me are a PITA. That said, until they shut it down and give me no choice I'm not switching.

In regards to the battery issue, I just plugged it into my generator when we lost power during Sandy. SO I had phone and tv again while riding out the storm.

That's a good solution if you have a generator. I don't so it won't work for me.

I'm sorry, but this is silly. All of these technologies have vulnerabilities that could result in a loss of service, especially during extreme weather events. For example, if you live or work in the Financial District of NYC and you were on copper, you may have lost service for WEEKS after Hurricane Sandy because all the underground copper corroded while submerged in storm-surge flooding. Fiber customers got service back in a few days since all they had to do was replace the distributors. Staying on copper is no panacea against future service loss.

If you're making decisions based on reliability during extreme situations, you're probably best served buying a cheap prepaid cellphone, since cellphones by their very nature have redundancies to help mitigate interference and service loss (in other words, you are served by multiple towers; if one goes down you still have others to provide service. And if you lose service entirely, you can move to a location where you can get service.) Buy a cellphone and use your car to charge it if you lose power for an extended period.

But clinging doggedly to your POTS line and raging on the Internets because of this is just dumb.
Edited by UnnDunn - 2/20/13 at 9:32pm

You do make a really good point...