FIOS Hosed

Two nights ago I was doing side work with the screen door closed and the sounds of the neighboorhood drifting in through the door. Sounds like kids playing, cars passing by, dogs barking and someone mowing their lawn. Suddenly my laptop lost it's connection to the internet. Hrmm...

After checking the laptop and the rebooting the router twice, I decided on a whim to check the FIOS cable that the Verizon install team left exposed and running behind my house to the terminal. Shortly after I got to the grassy strip behind my house, I discovered it. A gash in the line that was more than likely caused by that lawnmower I heard.

Well, if you have FIOS running your internet AND your phone, you're really screwed when you try to contact Verizon to have them come and fix your service in the middle of the night. So I called them on my cell phone and had to schedule to leave work early the next day in order to meet the repair technician. He pointed out that it looked as thought the contractor that was paid to bury the FIOS cable had done the work, but never connected it to the house as there was a coil of fiber cable poking it's way out of the ground beneath the external housing.

So now that I'm back up and running at home and I have a buried fiber line, I think I'll be dropping Comcast and put all of my eggs in the Verizon basket by picking up FIOS TV. It'll even save me a few bucks per month and the best part is that I won't have to deal with their crappy DVR UI again.