After months of negotiations and haggling, the Town Council and Verizon finally reached agreement on the terms and conditions for deployment of FiOS throughout the town. So, for the past couple of weeks, Verizon has been busy stringing fiber-optic cable around the town.

Verizon’s FiOS offers a bundled package of services (phone, Internet and TV), as does Cox Comunications, who holds the town’s existing Cable TV franchise. It will be interesting to see what pricing structure Verizon will offer to encourage Cox’s existinig customers to switch. Cox has had a monopoly on the Cable TV service for a number of year now. Maybe a little competition will be a good thing.

I’ve had Verizon’s DSL service since February of 1999 and it has been very reliable. I consistently get the best case speeds (3Mbps incoming, 768Kbps outgoing) and outages have been few and far between. Verizon is planning on offering existing DSL subscribers an incentive to switch to FiOS, so I will probably opt to do so. The basic FIOS package offers best case speeds of 5Mbps incoming and 2Mbps outgoing, so I’ll get a llittle performance boost in the process.