I will be moving within the next year, and I’m unfortunately in a bind. Craving bandwidth and California’s Bay Area just don’t seem to be getting along.
Verizon’s FiOS has long been a holdout for many, with Verizon’s expansive deployment and perpetually-upping of bandwidth speeds (they hit 50 mbps tiers this week), it hasn’t been fun topping out at 8 mbps with Comcast in the entire Bay Area. While this may seem like a no-brainer for Verizon, unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Verizon has trouble expanding FiOS in areas where they do not provide local phone service. First, they don’t own local fiber loops to get the traffic to people’s homes. Second, they don’t own the phone system (AT&T does in the entire region). Third, they don’t have the people on-the-ground to bring up to FiOS.
Verizon even commented on their public policy blog to this effect (without detailing the reasons above), and they agreed, it isn’t happening any time soon.
Just to add insult to injury, about an hour north of the Bay Area, Surewest offers their version of FiOS, running up to 50 mbps for a little more than what Verizon charges… in pretty much every area.
This, of course, makes me between a rock and a hard place. A lot of projects I’ll be working on require networking in the Bay Area. With the added cost of living, it certainly would be nice to bring the new dedicated PhoneNews.com server in-house, but alas, looks like I’ll be settling for a load-balancing router, and combining AT&T DSL with Comcast cable… for a 12 mbps shotgun connection.