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Old 01-19-2007, 12:44 PM   #5
mbpark
Lecturer
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Carmel, Indiana
Posts: 761
Not in Philly

FIOS will not be in the city limits, so Philadelphia won't have fast Internet.

Bensalem, Hulmeville, and many other towns will.

Verizon = not stupid. They know that FIOS in the city limits will cause them to lose a lot more money providing Internet to the less affluent areas, because the Street administration will make them wire up North Philadelphia, Kensington, and West Philly first. From what I remember, Comcast doesn't even service the less fortunate parts of Philly yet, some division of Time Warner Cable (Urban Cableworks) and DirecTV do. Verizon provides phone service there, and that's it. Comcast is taking over Urban CableWorks' domain and providing some cable service due to their settlement with Time Warner regarding the takeover of Adelphia's operations. However, DirecTV is the major player in the ghetto (i.e. a big chunk of Philly).

I will admit, some of those areas of Philly are quite harsh.

However, this leaves many of their larger customers in Center City in the lurch, as their business DSL options are not that fast. We're at the point where the home Internet connections are 4x the speed of a T1 line through Comcast, and even faster via FIOS, and they're still charging a ton of cash for Business DSL at 1.5Mbit or 3Mbit/s. Your average small business will have a faster Internet connection than many businesses in Center City.

Yes, there's Wireless Philly. However, a shared Wifi connection won't cut it for many businesses that run services from their office. Considering you're sharing that service with many parts of Philly that don't know how to spell Antivirus or know what a security patch is, it really won't cut it.

However, the Cable part is what many people are looking forward to, if they can provide decent service above that of Comcast, which should not be too hard. This IS Verizon though, and not Verizon Wireless, so I expect the quality of service to be of the same type that has caused people to flee to Comcast and Vonage for phone service.

I also expect that certain features of Cable which I like, such as On Demand, will also be much different, and may not feature many of the free features (network shows, free movies) or premium features (Howard Stern On Demand) that I use and like.
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