my family got fios after years of comcast. monthly servicing for random issues were a regular part of my life growing up. they were late every time, and offered us on demand credit or general account credit every time. i theorized that it was clearly intentional to make comcast seem like nice fellas. wow, they credit us whenever they inconvenience us? how nice!
but every single time? fishy. we always had faster internet than most people of the time, in terms of mbps (around 10-13, which was good for the era of 2000's), so I never considered us to have slow internet, but the internet was unreliable and youtube was always slow as fuck.
after fios came to our area, I saw the light. we paid for 15/15 internet, got 25/25 regularly, and our desktop PC got 38/29 on ethernet connection, and we got 9 ms ping time, which is the actual amount of time it takes to transfer data between the server and the computer. THIS is why comcast was actually slow. yeah, we could load a 10 mbps video that someone with 5 mbps internet literally would not be able to load, but the actual speed at which that download happens is related to ping. comcast was always like 120-130 ms, so not only did we get 25/25 internet, which was MORE than we paid for (rather than less with comcast), but we also got fiber optic ping time which made everything much more responsive.
the cable box interface was much nicer, especially DVR, and multi room DVR was way ahead of its time.
when we got fios installed, they were there for several hours, like somewhere between 4 and 5 hours, but when they left, we never have had a technician come to fix anything since then.
anyways, about 5 or so years into our service, the comcast salesman came by with a deal on the triple play, and my dad always preferred the on demand selection of comcast (even though we rarely used it), and would rant about fios even though I would always show him he was wrong. anyways, he was seduced by the comcast salesman and the cheap price, and NO CONTRACT that the guy offered. we got that in writing.
26 days later, after the guy failed to bring cable boxes (we had to drive to a store and get them ourselves) when setting up our comcast service, failed to bring a router (we had to buy one online ourselves, took a week to deliver, we had a brand new windows 7 computer that was useless without ethernet for a week), tv interface was terrible (had to give up all my DVR recordings of course), internet would go out, had to have a guy come bring us a new router because he claimed ours was broken, new one was worse, and several technicians had to come, always late, and they had a strict time limit (as opposed to fios, who never leaves until the issue is resolved, or the set up is complete and tested), we cancelled, and they said we'd have to pay $325 early termination fee and forfeit the $200 gift card that was promised to us if we stayed for at least a month. luckily we had "no contract" in writing, so those assholes didn't money grub $325 from us.
funnily enough, the day after that was going to be the last day of our fios service. my dad never cancelled it because secretly, he was as skeptical of comcast as I was. I got my DVR recordings back, we got our internet back (I wasn't able to load youtube videos on my iPod touch for that entire month. they simply would take too long to buffer and I got impatient), and we havent looked back.