Oregon blogger, family man and self-professed geek Jim Goings switched from Comcast to FiOS last week, and has posted an insightful "real world comparison and review," complete with photos of the installed equipment, FiOS TV Interactive Media Guide, and speed test results.

While some old, bad connectors in Jim's house stretched his FiOS tech's visit to 7 hours, "the tech was very thorough, did a neat and tidy install. he also picked up his trash which was very courteous."

While this wasn't too surprising based on the FiOS installation stories I've read, the real eye-opener was in Jim's take on the comparative speed tests:

"It is important to note that Comcast cheats like crazy on the speedtest reports, regardless of which one you use. They even have a marketing term for their cheat… SpeedBoost. Basically, Comcast will give you excellent bandwidth (in my case, 20Mbps) for the first 10 seconds or so of any download. After that 10 seconds of bliss, however, you are knocked back down to a more modest 6-8Mbps. This makes Comcast look great on speed and bandwidth reports, but has little bearing on what you can get sustained. Sure, this will make web pages load quicker, but won’t help you with any data transfer."

The above statement is backed up with comparative graphs that show there is indeed a sharp drop-off in Jim's connection speed with Comcast when downloading a large file.

Jim's otherwise-glowing review did express disappointment in his VOD experience so far, stating that he wasn't able to find the high-def video-on-demand selections -- while FiOS TV just launched HD VOD in December with 75 titles, there are 1,000 scheduled to be available by the end of the year, which should make them a bit easier to find.

Posted by Jim 2.0 | tagged: compare, speed, Mbps, internet, reviews, FiOS, HD, DVR, TV