February 23, 2008

Cable or FIOS: Which One Will It Be

The cable and telephone companies are in a massive fight for consumer and business "triple-play" services. They want to provide your internet service, telephone service and TV service - including, especially for businesses other services such as managed email, security, CRM and more.

Which one will you choose?

One is not better than the other, but as your business grows and if you consider switching from cable to telephone or vice versa, keep your eyes open to what new developments are expected.

The WSJ writes Called Docsis 3.0, the technology will allow the cable industry to compete on a more even footing with telecom giant Verizon Communications Inc., which is aggressively marketing a high-performance fiber-optic network called FiOS that offers much faster Internet connection speeds than cable modems can currently deliver. Whether the cable industry can roll out the new technology fast enough to minimize the damage from FiOS remains to be seen.

What's so important is SERVICE. For the second time in about as many months, I had to call Earthlink and get help for my DSL service not working. The last time and this time, the "system" (not the computer) simply needed to be reset. But how was I to know that every few months I would have to re-verify my DSL connection or have my modem reset!

Even with these problems, Earthlink support (based in India) is very thorough and good.

tags: cable , dsl , internet , telephone | 0 comments