Comcast vs Verizon

[Velvis]

A client of mine has fairly frequent outages they are looking to switch to Verizon Fios. Anyone have any opinions as to which service is more reliable?




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[YeOldeStonecat]

Residential or business? For business ....Comcast is our favorite ISP of the big ones.
For residential...it's always a crapshoot...reliability can vary from neighborhood to neighborhood...even from street to street, those lines for residentials are typically mix matched in age and quality.

 

[brandonkick]

What service do they have now? I assume neither of the two you mentioned?

I like Comcast.... I've had experience with it both in a business and I've had it at
home for a long time. The part I have a gripe with is their "policies". As a result
of trying to get my bill lower, I had to drop internet speeds and change "packages".
On my old package, it was $10 extra a month to double my internet speed from
100 Mbps to 200 Mbps (and regularly got 20-50 more than that). Now that I'm on
the lowest package, I get 25 Mbps and have no option to double it. Seems silly but
so far 25 is fine for me.

If FIOS is in the area, I might be tempted to go that way. 100 Mbps down AND up is
huge. I never got more than about 10-12 Mbps up.... which should be plenty fine
for the vast majority of people but the FIOS is also cheap. I saw where they were
offering $39.99 a month for the 100 / 100 package.

I'd say either are solid choices. Comcast's customer service, esp for residential can
leave a LOT to be desired. However, once you get up and going, you very very
rarely need to call them.

DO NOT use Verizon DSL, my god the horror stories I've seen with that service. I've
dealt with it at a place I used to work and at my fathers business. What a POS.

 

[DataMedics]

I haven't personally dealt with Comcast much, but I know from relatives the next state over that they never deliver the speeds they advertise to you.

Some years back we switched everything from Cox to Verizon, and couldn't be happier. The speed and reliability of Verizon FIOS is great. I've got the fiber line coming right into my office now, so the latency is minimal.

I'd never use a Verizon phone plan again, hated the company when I had that, but their FIOS is good.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

My experience in Connecticut with Comcast is they typically deliver about 5% greater than what you sign up for. We have a loooottttt of biz clients on 'em.

 

[phaZed]

FiOS is the better service. Both technically and business-wise, IMO.
It will depend on your area, but I find Comcast to be pretty shady... their advertised speeds are almost never hit. Peak usage times and 'neighborhood-sharing' of bandwidth is still a problem.

I have cancelled their service twice in my life, at two different locations and malicious billing occurred. Once for $400 and the other for $700. Cancelling over the phone is an exercise in futility as they hang up on you after 5 minutes of trying to keep you on their service and offer you this and that.

"Ma'am, I'm moving.. I don't need the service. CANCEL MY SERVICE! CANCEL MY SERVICE! I WANT TO SPEAK TO A SUPERVISOR!"

"Click". They hang up. I had to physically go to a Comcast building to get it cancelled. The "bad bills" came a few months later and had to be taken care of at the courthouse after 8 months of fighting, credit reporting, etc. This isn't a unique story.

Verizon may be only slightly better on the billing side, but at least they haven't acted fraudulently yet.

As an electrician, I worked at many of my regional "hub-sites" for Comcast and it is absolutely shocking how poorly implemented it is. I installed over 15 of these 50kVA generators across the VA area:

Just outside of Charlottesville in a small town of Waynesboro, on the side of a mountain they have a 50'x50' area with barbed wire fencing a few satellites and a $300 cheap metal Home-Depot shed. Inside the leaking, rodent infested 20 year old shed, shed they have a million dollars of rack equipment that serves the Upper North-West area with comcast tv and internet.
The state of the hub sites was deplorable. 90% of them are in what I would call "temporary locations" that became permanent. The other 10% are actual buildings that are leased/purchased or the Customer service centers/downtown office building type deals.

Go fiber. Say no to cable if you can.

 

[tek9]

I have a few customers on Comcast and others on FiOS. With Comcast we get sporadic outages, but FiOS never goes down unless the power goes out. I've setup the Untangle routers WAN Failover apps to alert me when the WAN circuit goes down (even though it doesn't actually failover to a second ISP since they only have one. It's just used for alerting). The ones on Comcast time out every now and then. The FiOS ones didn't go down in over a year so far.

 

[HFultzjr]

In my area, Verizon DSL is only 1 step better than satellite.............LOL.
Don't know about their other services, but cable (Atlantic Broadband), kicks their butt.
Again, we don't have many choices.

 

[Markverhyden]

I'm a big fan of FIOS, if it's available. That's what I'll steer customers to. Incredibly FIOS is not available in most of Boston and Cambridge. At least in businesses.

 

[sapphirescales]

Comcast absolutely SUCKS as a company. They used to be a lot better, but if both FiOS was available and Comcast, I would go with FiOS without a second thought. Never used Verizon DSL so I can't comment on that.

 

[Velvis]

They currently have Comcast and have had outages of late. They use VOIP phones so its a big issue.
I didn't want to recommend switching to FIOS and find out its the same or worse.

 

[phaZed]

They currently have Comcast and have had outages of late. They use VOIP phones so its a big issue.
I didn't want to recommend switching to FIOS and find out its the same or worse.

I sincerely doubt you will, with FiOS.

 

[brandonkick]

I found out Comcast upped me to 50 Mbps / 6 Mbps..... plenty fine for me even if I wanted to stream 4K. Which I do not, since I do not own a 4K set.

They do that from time to time. Feels a lot "better" than the 25 did... it was just a tiny bit on the slow side but still felt reasonably usable. I just need to relocate my UniFi to the center of my house now... this xfinity wifi keeps going crappo on me lately.