FIOS in Parkside

I've seen a lot of online comments in recent days from people all excited about Verizon FIOS internet currently being installed in the Parkside neighborhood. For most of the area this is something new but we have had FIOS for a little more than five years now and it is certainly not all that great or such a big improvement over Spectrum which most of the people in the area have in their homes for internet if folks get their basic package.

Shortly after we retired some six years ago I was very excited to cut the cable and drop our Spectrum services for both cable TV and internet service. We moved to Verizon FIOS for our internet which had just become available to us on our block. We subscribed to Sling TV along with a couple of other streaming services for our television. 

Right from the very beginning we had problems with the FIOS internet service. It kept dropping out, didn't reach areas of our home and was very slow. We kept seeing the spinning disc on our TV as it struggled to stream shows. At the time I think we started out paying about 40 dollars a month for service at 300 Mpbs. It obviously was not enough bandwidth. I had the Verizon service tech at the house about six times over the first two years and they replaced our router twice and at one point rewired the house and the line from the pole. 

Eventually we all agreed I needed more bandwidth although there was only two of us in the house using the interne but we did have multiple devices. My wife and I were each regularly each using a laptop, a phone and a tablet. We have a streaming television and I also have another laptop running our sound system streaming music.  I'm also getting ready to install wireless Bluetooth speakers throughout the house and ditch all the wiring.

To make all this work I needed to upgrade my FIOS account to their Gigabyte Connection service at $80 a month and got a better router. I was still having problems. Now granted our old house with thick walls can be a problem getting a signal everywhere and I also never could get a workable signal in our backyard and enclosed cabana which I used a lot with my laptop.

About three years ago after we upgraded our service I also went and spent three hundred dollars on an Eero Mesh WiFi router system with three units. One I attached to our FIOS router, one went upstairs and the other on the first floor at the back of the house. The improvement was amazing. I no longer have problems sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop or having a good connection upstairs in a bedroom with a tablet. I can also sit in the cabana sunroom with my laptop and search the internet or sit on a chair in the backyard with a connection.

I am going to have to add a comment to that FB Parkside group conversation concerning my experiences with FIOS.