I’m been quite disappointed with my internet connection ever since I moved to Fairfax and started using Cox. It never seems particularly reliable and the speeds are very inconsistent and even unusably slow sometimes. Unlike every other community within Fairfax county, Reston has service from Comcast and say what you will about their business practices, I always had great internet service from them when I lived there. Once I found out FiOS was going to be available in my neighborhood about the time I got back from Europe, I was looking forward to stepping off the plane and signing up for FiOS.

My enthusiasm waned a bit when I looked at the price and speed tiers Verizon offered. Their packages were nearly identical in almost every way to the packages Cox offered. Though I’ve heard nothing but great things about FiOS, I’ve found it hard to justify the switch. Verizon is about as unlikable a company as there can be but, along with Comcast, I was willing to cut them some slack if they actually delivered a good product. There are a few less notable features that FiOS can offer – FiOS doesn’t need to compress the video as much so the picture quality for TV is (supposedly) better, it should be able to scale up to faster speeds easier, and the advertised speed is actually what you get on a consistent day to day, minute to minute basis (unlike many of the cable companies). That said, I’ve been hard-pressed to take the effort to switch providers for relatively minor, if any, changes to service. Obviously, my reluctance struck a cord because today I read that Verizon is upping their speeds in all tiers in the near future. Looks like I’ll be signing up very shortly after all…