Mysterious Fios bill increase!! (movies, pay, top)

[FCNova]

Sounds about right

[Jon_In_NOVA]

I've done the same thing with a few of the posters. We now rock Netflix and Hulu and have Comcast medium grade internet. While I will truly miss football in the fall and True blood this summer the $2grand savings will be nice. While we are not hurting for disposable income I stand firm on the point that I will not be a trapped and cornered consumer. I may even ditch Hulu because Netflix has more than enough content for us. At some point I will start the project of getting an over the air HD antenna and use the existing coax infrastructure within my house when I rip the DirecTV antenna off the roof.

With all these streaming media services cropping up lately I can't see how these service providers can sustain their rate of billing to the average customer.

To be brutally honest it is actually nice to not be a slave to the TV after work and on the weekends. I have been able to spend more time with the wife, exercise and catch up on some good reading. I am also a kid at heart and still play some video games too which is a fun break as well.

[jillybean720]

Such a minor fluctuation like that could very well be a change in a federal, county, state, etc., fee or tax rate, not necessarily Verizon. Check each line item of your bill to see where the change was.

For those thinking Verizon is evil and you should switch to Comcast, this is EXACTLY why I left Comcast and switched to Verizon! The grass is always greener...it got to the point my Comcast bill had increased each month for FOUR months in a row, and when I called, they gave me the run around, so I just said screw it and dropped them.

I had better luck with Verizon, but in keeping our costs down, we ditched all cable and just use Netflix, HuluPlus, and Amazon Prime, which we stream through our PS3. I like having a home phone, so we ditched Verizon home phone service and bought an Ooma. Now we only have Verizon FiOS internet.

[Jon_In_NOVA]

Jilly,
How do you like Ooma? My wife wants to keep the home phone (VOIP through Comcast). If I can ditch that and use Ooma, I am only left with Comcast internet which will give me bargaining room between Fios and Comcast rates, bandwidth and customer service.

[jillybean720]

Originally Posted by Jon_In_NOVA

Jilly,
How do you like Ooma? My wife wants to keep the home phone (VOIP through Comcast). If I can ditch that and use Ooma, I am only left with Comcast internet which will give me bargaining room between Fios and Comcast rates, bandwidth and customer service.

It's worked just fine for us. I honestly only use our home phone for maybe 3 calls a week. After the upfront expense of purchasing the Ooma unit (about $100, if I recall correctly), we now only pay less than $4 per month for the service/usage fees (things like 911 service fee). Sure beats the $30/month Verizon wanted to charge us to add home phone, and it uses the same connection since it uses our FiOS internet. We did bump up to the second tier of internet speed from Verizon, but the cost difference was essentially a wash since the higher tier does not charge us a monthly rental fee for the router. We haven't had any bandwidth issues at all when having a phone call and streaming at the same time.

[snowdenscold]

Originally Posted by jillybean720

We haven't had any bandwidth issues at all when having a phone call and streaming at the same time.

From a BW perspective, the usage for a VoIP call is pretty minimal - either about 24 or 80 kbps, depending on codec, which is generally less than 1% of what people have for home speeds now.

Quality of Service (QoS) is generally more of an issue, making sure the tiny voice packets aren't stuck behind big data transfer packets, which can be a concern if it's some VoIP solution that your home router knows nothing about, but most of the time that won't matter.

[paulbunyan]

Buy one of these. I have had one for 2 years with FIOS and had ZERO problems HDHomeRun Prime | Welcome to SiliconDust I only pay $4 a month for an M card and get HD on all TVs in my house

[pseudo]

It is the new "FDV Administrative Fee" charge of 0.99 cents that caused your bill to go up. There is plenty of activity concerning it on the internets and they can be easily located with the assistance of a search engine. Basically, another extra dollar for something...

[jillybean720]

Originally Posted by paulbunyan

Buy one of these. I have had one for 2 years with FIOS and had ZERO problems HDHomeRun Prime | Welcome to SiliconDust I only pay $4 a month for an M card and get HD on all TVs in my house

In reading the link, you still have to pay for cable subscription, though, right? This just eliminates the need for monthly rental fees of the set top boxes.

[farplaner]

Yes, and you still need some other device to watch the video. (Xbox 360, PC, etc)