When cable television systems were invented in 1948, Harry Truman was president and few Americans owned TVs. Since then, television sets have morphed from monstrous boxes into svelte flatscreens and we now have hundreds of channels, but cable’s basic guts are largely unchanged.
So it’s understandable why so many TV buffs are begging Verizon Communications Inc. to bring its Fiber Optic Service, or FIOS, to specific neighborhoods. It’s the first service in the U.S. to deliver television, Internet, and phone connections directly into homes over speedy fiber-optic cables rather than the relatively sluggish copper wires that cable relies on. In short, you get more high-definition channels and faster Internet speeds.
Since FIOS TV started in late 2005, it has been largely limited to a small number of markets, mostly suburban. That’s now changing. New York-based Verizon is undertaking an aggressive expansion effort aimed at turning FIOS into a true nationwide competitor to cable.
FIOS is now available in 16 states, and has only recently moved into large urban markets such as New York City, which got it for the first time in July. As of Jan. 1, the number of homes with FIOS access was 12.7 million (of them, 2.5 million subscribe to the Internet service, and 1.9 million to FIOS TV). By the end of 2010, Verizon expects that figure to top 18 million.
While companies such as AT&T Inc. have begun laying their own fiber-based networks, these typically rely on copper cables for at least part of the data’s journey into a home, creating bottlenecks and limiting capabilities.
$700 Connection
FIOS and its expansion come at a price, both to Verizon and to its customers. Most basic FIOS TV subscriptions cost between $48 and $58 per month (a bit more than cable in most markets), and that’s before you start adding on premium channels, DVR rentals, Internet access, and phone service.
Verizon has invested billions in its network — the company estimates that it costs about $700 to lay the fiber outside a single house in a suburban market and another $700 to connect a house to the network. That’s $1,400 for every household that subscribes, and $700 even for those that don’t. Still, Verizon expects the service to be profitable for the first time in 2009, according to Joseph Ambeault, FIOS’s director of consumer product development.
So is a FIOS subscription worth it? That depends on how much you love your TV. After spending a fair amount of time with FIOS TV, I can say that it provides a noticeably superior experience to cable that goes beyond the perk of extra high- definition channels (FIOS offers at least 100 in every market). The coolest things about FIOS are features that simply aren’t possible on copper cable networks. Here are three to keep an eye out for:
Uncompressed Video
Not all high-definition channels are created equal. Some look great, but others are barely better than their standard-def counterparts. Fact is, there is no regulation over an HD channel’s quality. The only thing a station needs to qualify as “high-definition” is a whole lot of pixels — at least 720 vertically. As a result, cable companies can, and do, apply heavy compression to their signals. This saves bandwidth, allowing companies to supply more high-definition channels, but it can also erode picture quality.
Verizon says its video is “uncompressed.” This is true, to an extent. All television is compressed by content providers when it is sent to cable and satellite companies. But according to Verizon, FIOS’s greater capacity allows it to transmit hundreds of high-definition channels without any further compression.
Speedier Back-and-Forth
Press a button on a cable remote, and it often takes a few moments for it to register. Try scrolling through an on-screen program guide, and this delay makes it very easy to overshoot your target.
The problem: With both cable and fiber optics, very few on- screen operations are done on the cable box’s built-in memory. Instead, whenever you press a button, your command is sent across the network to a central server, which then sends back its response. Copper wires are very slow at uploading data to these central servers, resulting in a problem known as latency.
Not so with fiber optic cables. A regular input that takes 400 milliseconds — almost half a second — with cable can be completed in just 40 milliseconds on FIOS, making menu navigation far less frustrating.
DVDs on Demand
For movie buffs who have grown accustomed to feature-filled DVDs, cable’s on-demand offerings can be a bit of a let-down. FIOS hopes to change that: Its bandwidth allows it to stream an entire DVD disc worth of content. So instead of just watching an on-demand episode of “The Sopranos,” you’ll be able to pull up the director’s commentary, deleted scenes, and all the other frills that are common on DVDs.
This technology currently exists, but before the feature can be turned on, Verizon still needs to iron out content arrangements with movie studios and television networks. Although Verizon wouldn’t disclose an exact timeframe, it should come soon, according to spokeswoman Deidre Mulcahy, and I’d be surprised if it didn’t happen by the end of this year. When it does, FIOS’s on-demand catalogue will gradually transition into the new format.
(Seth Porges is an editor for Popular Mechanics and a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)