When I moved to Connecticut from California, I made sure that my new home had Verizon FiOs. FiOs is the promised land, where the phone company drags optical fiber all the way to your doorstep, your bandwidth isn’t shared by your neighborhood, and reliability and service are features you can say aloud without laughing.

To tell you the truth, after 3 years of enjoying FiOs, that’s exactly what Verizon delivered.

Yesterday, for the first time ever, my FiOs was out cold. I called tech support, which answered relatively promptly, and went through the obligatory motions of re-trying everything I had already tried twice. No dice. 

Two hours later, a Verizon service tech named Steve was leaving my house, new router in place and everything working fine. After a conversation with him about Verizon, I feel better than ever about my service. As a tech, Steve was candidly very impressed with his company, recalling an experience where his bosses would tell him that if there was an outage that required 6 techs in a home – he would get his 6 techs, period. That’s unheard of.

This reminded me of the original rollout of DSL in Silicon Valley, which was so explosively popular and poorly planned that Pac Bell would literally fail to even answer the phone at all (which resulted in a class-action lawsuit).

I can’t speak for Verizon phone, wireless, or DSL service, but as for my FiOs service, its been outstanding.

But probably one of the best features of FiOs is that it is so outstanding, its been forcing Cablevision to actually compete. In other areas of the country, its cable or DSL, and DSL simply can’t compete except on the very lowest tiers.

And so it is that Cablevision has drawn a new line in the sand, by announcing that on May 11th, it will be deploying 101 Mbps ‘Ultra’ internet service throughout its entire service area. As far as I know, its the fastest residential internet available anywhere in the US, employing similar DOCSIS 3.0 technology Japan has enjoyed for years.

Currently, I believe the top speeds for both Cablevision and FiOs are around 50 Mbps. But even my 25/25 Mbps service from FiOs is $70 a month, so $99 is going to be a value any way you slice it.

I’m tempted to switch, but it would be more of a ‘hey-look-what-I got’ service more than anything else.

With 25 Mbps service (and even lower), streaming HD video from Amazon or Netflix is a pretty seamless experience to begin with, and I am totally fine with the rare super-big download taking a while.

Also, from experience I can tell you that 25 Mbps is a tough speed to realize in practice due to the ‘long fat pipe’ problem (which I discuss in my FiOs Optimization Guide). Basically, any given connection from your computer to another on the internet needs to go through several hops and routes, slowing it down. In my experience, in order to actually get 20 Mbps+ speeds, you really need to use a download accelerator which saturates your bandwidth using multiple connections, or use other apps which work similarly, such as BitTorrent.

But here’s the real catch: from what I understand, Cablevision is really pushing its limit on what it can do with its current equipment at 101 Mbps. Any faster, and they may need to start stealing bandwidth from its TV lineup, which is unlikely.

On the other hand, Verizon FiOs can turn on speeds of up to 400 Mbps *tommorrow* with its current equipment (well, except that in order to get speeds over 90 Mbps, they are going to have to replace my router with one featuring Gigabit ethernet ports).

With this in mind, its inevitable that FiOs will respond in kind to the new Cablevision move with a competitive tier soon anyway. 

I called Cablevision yesterday, and as expected, you cannot schedule an appointment yet for 101 Mbps service. I was impressed, however, that the representative actually knew what I was talking about. She has promised to give me a callback when its available in my area, as she expressed concern that it would probably be a phased rollout by neighborhood.

I am also interested to see if Cablevision distributes new equipment with Gigabit Ethernet ports, as this would be required to actually see 101 Mbps speeds.

I know alot of people will argue that because of bandwidth sharing intrinsic to Cable internet, that no one will ever see actual speeds of 101 Mbps either way. But in my experience with cable, it will be ‘very close’, and the variance throughout the day will be negligible, although some neighborhoods will be worse than others, Any way you slice it, however, it’s likely to be the fastest home internet in the country by a large margin, and definitely the best value on on Mbps-per-dollar basis.

Any way you slice it, this is a win for consumers, as Cablevision has set a very high bar.