Well, it has been about 5 months since my switch from Comcast to Verizon FIOS. And I had my first "incident" with FIOS over the weekend. 5 months and only 1 outage! That is definitely an improvement in service (with Comcast, outages were about once a month).
So I tepidly called Verizon tech support to report the outage. Having been through 9 years of Comcast "service", I was expecting the worst. With Comcast, 9 times out of 10, when there was a problem, it was with their infrastructure, yet the techs never knew that (I suspected it since all things on my end were fine and unchanged).
With a Comcast call, usually you had to jump through a bunch of hoops - the same ones each time, and at the end, they would "schedule a tech" to come out for sometime next week. By the time the "date" rolled around (and sometimes the same day of the outage), the service would "miraculously" start working all on its own, so at least I would not waste half a day waiting for a tech to show up (that usually never did).
So I called and started doing the push button shuffle. Surprisingly, I got to a live person in about 1 minute! Now that is good! She took my information and started running her diagnostics. Apologizing a couple of times for it taking so long. She had me reset the router once. Then reset the FIOS box and then told me to wait a few minutes.
A couple of minutes passed and she told me to "try the Internet now". WOW! It actually worked! Seems she knows what she is talking about!
The only gotcha was that I had to reset the router to my settings (for security and wireless purposes) which took all of about 5 minutes.
I am not a fan of monopolies, and while phone companies are no longer monopolies (we have another company in the area that I have used before), they are still big and usually unresponsive. But Verizon is sure trying its damnedest to change my mind. I switched to Verizon Cell 5 years ago because of poor service I had with my previous provider. And have not had a problem with their cell service since.
Now I have their FIOS as well (Landline, Internet and TV), and they are basically showing me I was lazy to not try them before! So far, they are head and shoulders above Comcast (and cheaper).
I am going to hate it when my contract is up. Even if Comcast offers me a deal to switch back, I am going to be hesitant to unless Verizon's service rapidly deteriorates.
Maybe Verizon has made the switch from a monopolistic utility to a customer service company. If so, price is not the only consideration I will use when deciding. Still early (only 5 months), but so far so good!