Verizon Hikes FiOS Rates by Six Percent
Nov 1st, 2009 by Alex
I just got an “important notice” in the mail from Verizon.
We will be upgrading your FiOS Internet speed to up to 10/2 Mbps in the next few months.
Emphasis theirs, it’s strange the way that the sentence is phrased. Maybe it’s boilerplate in that they can’t say that they’ll give you exactly 10/2 but that it’ll be somewhere around there, but it reads to me like it isn’t much of a upgrade. Maybe they’ll give me 6/2 or 8/2. Something around there, perhaps. Not that I utilize the 5/2 Mbps now except for the occasional Knoppix or CentOS torrent, but okay.
We also want to let you know that the rate for your FiOS Internet service will be increasing to $52.99 effective on December 1, 2009. No action is require to maintain your service at the new rate — you’ll continue to enjoy all the benefits your current Verizon FiOS Internet service has to offer. This rate increase is unrelated to the speed increase we will be implementing for your FiOS Internet service plan.
This is the real meat of it. A six percent rate hike.
And no kidding the hike isn’t related to any speed increase. The amount of effort required to change my connection from 5Mb to 15Mb (or even 100Mb for that matter) is a few keystrokes at most. No new hardware. No new cabling. No technician to come out to the house. The fiber optic line buried out back is more than capable of ten times that amount of data. If anything, I’d be burning up the CPU on the router.
In short, they’re raising the rate because they can. No additional costs incurred on their part. No additional benefit to me. It’s starting to feel a bit like my experience with Comcast.
FiOS is actually slower than the Comcast service I gave up, but it is so much less hassle. I think I’m on a two year contract, so I will see if they jack up my rate as well.
[...] Internet may be fast, but it isn’t cheap, and now a 6% increase. Details at Technology & [...]
I’ve had FiOS since it was rolled out in my neighborhood. Last spring, I called them to find out if I could lower my bill - at that time they said that I was not in a standard bundle and that I had special “discounts” applied to the bill (sounds like a bundle to me) but that the discounts would expire in September. I called back in September and moved into a new bundle where I moved from 5/2 to 10/5 or something (I can’t fill the pipe anyway so I doesn’t matter). The interesting thing was that my bill went up by about $10, when I asked what would happen if I did nothing, I was told it would go up by ~$35 - so I opted for the bundle.
If I had reliable cell service within the confines of the house, I think I’d dump the voice service - but there are only 3 cell towers in my neck of the woods and I live on the edge of two of them…
I recommend setting aside an hour and a half or so, and call to complain.
yellojkt: It’s faster than Comcast ever was, plus has lower latency. Most important — and what I didn’t note above — is that I’ve only had one outage (which was during an 8-10 hour power outage, during which time I couldn’t have utilized it anyways) since I got it; world’s above Comcast in the uptime department.
Damien/Matt: I’ve thought about calling. I’ve got the cheapest/slowest data-only plan. Aside from wanting to keep me on as a customer, I’m not sure what room I’ve got to bargain with. I really wish they’d start to offer multi-product discounts, like if you have cellular service with them.