We renewed our contract with Verizon and upgraded to the FiOS Gigabit plan

We’ve been out of contract with Verizon for their FiOS service for maybe two years now. Every time I went online to check their plans, any renewal would require me to increase my monthly spend for TV-internet-phone service another $30 a month. For the same service I have now! Are you crazy? Why should I do that?

We were content to run with this until recently, when Verizon threatened to take away our HBO and Showtime. Surprisingly for my lovely low-maintenance wife, this was a bridge to far for her, and told me to renew our contract. I renewed it online, and agreed to pay the extra amount. However, we looked at the budget and decided to bump up the broadband speeds from 75/75 Mbps to 150/150 Mbps for the nominal increase. This would require a truck roll — a Verizon tech had to come out to replace our BPON Optical Network Terminal (ONT) on the outside of our house, with a GPON ONT, which would be able to handle the increased speeds.

Due to a rescheduled meeting, I had to try to move around a bunch of doctor’s appointments, and the Verizon truck roll and install planned for Tues afternoon. I called up to reschedule, and the representative worked with to not only reschedule the install for Sunday morning, but:

  • Kept the same phone and TV plan
  • Upgraded to the Gigabit Internet broadband tier (up to 940 Mbps up and down)
  • Free Samsung Chrombook
  • Savings in monthly fees in what I recently signed up for — net increase of about $9 from what we were paying out of contract.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a good deal. We would also be required to get one of their Quantum routers, so we’re renting that for now. What I was worried about was whether the Verizon tech would do the required steps for us to achieve that level of speed. For most speeds, your existing coaxial cable can support enough throughput for both the TV signal and broadband internet. At a certain level, you max out on being able to do that. Verizon could install the new terminal and router, but you have a bottleneck as soon as you hit the coaxial cable. Would Verizon wire the outside, then leave it to the customer to figure out how to resolve the run Cat6 Ethernet cable in the house for me?

Happy to say, I spoke to the tech when he arrived Sunday morning, and yes, he would be running Cat6 cable for me through my basement ceiling. Awesome, but in hindsight, I should have asked him to help me run additional cable while he was at it. I tried hinting, but he wasn’t going for it. Overall, the tech (Greg) was very knowledgeable and professional. Within two hours, the job was done.

Unfortunately, the backend at Verizon wasn’t updated yet, so we didn’t see upgraded speeds until late Monday afternoon. So far, it’s been useful for uploading videos. I’m still exploring the benefits of gigabit-level speeds. I checked this 2017 article from Digital Trend on”5 things to do before upgrading to Gigabit internet” and I’ve completed most of them recently, including hard-wiring four rooms for gigabit ethernet. Still need to redo the connections for some of the wires, and need to fish network cable through the basement ceiling for devices down there.
We’re almost there. Next year, I’d like to see us invest in a 4K TV, and these speeds would be very helpful when streaming 4K media.

In any case, check out the speeds below. Really interesting!


This entry was posted in Technology and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *