The drive to own a Philadelphia FiOS through the end of 2008 may be bogged down in town committee meetings along with a play by a cable business to get mobilized. The Corporation, which owns a smaller part of Philadelphia’s cable franchise, is lobbying for an equity partnership with Verizon. It currently services thousands of customers, mostly in Philadelphia Housing Authority units. A town councilman reviewing the Verizon proposal is concerned they might shed clients as PHA builds extra single household houses, and he has questions about outside minority contractors included within the Verizon installation.

Because of delays, the total City Council could not act till January on the proposal. There’s also a drive for Verizon to pay up front for public access channels. A committee of the Philadelphia City Council has approved Verizon’s prepare to construct a large FiOS network within the town; the complete Council may approve the settlement in two weeks – assuming no other roadblocks look.

The FiOS Philadelphia franchise contract using the city of Philadelphia requires Verizon to cover the whole town with FiOS inside of the first few many years. The committee amended the contract to provide Philly’s mayor much more power to enforce minority contracting problems. Verizon has committed to make a number of million in public access payments above the existence from the contract.

Thursday’s hearing was the third since early December ahead of the Philadelphia Metropolis Council, and there may be heavy lobbying by cable-incumbent and home-town business Comcast in opposition to the FiOS arrangement. Verizon fired back again above the past month with newspaper and radio ads to try to bring “cable choice” on the city. Both businesses probably want to play nicer inside future given the scrutiny more than broadband problems.

I am really more than satisfied with my FiOS HDTV. I can not start to share with you how pleased my family just after 5 days of viewing FIOS HDTV. Let’s begin with the installation.

I wasn’t around during the installation – I had to work overtime , but my son who is present told me that the gentleman who made the installation was kind enough to spell out all the instructions for a trouble-free navigation of channel and they are really experts and hard working guys. I did speak with the person on the phone when he needed to know my security password to configure the internet. By the time I arrived in our home from a tiring work, the technical guy had finished the installation and left immediately for another appointment nearby. But given my sister the enough information she needs to know, I found how uncomplicated it is to navigate through the TV channels.

Summarizing the things I like the most, here’s what I’ve come up with:

1. Navigation – in one word “simple” and I look forward to in the next couple of days to configure a “favorites” line up.

2. Picture quality – With the previous cable provider, the company take no notice of me when I notified them about the strength of signal coming into my house was poor, even after installing an attenuator! But when I switched to FiOS, the image on every TV in my house changed dramatically, it was superior to the previous one. In fact, the digital stations look the same as that of high definition compared to my old cable company. Again, I was more than satisfied with the result.

3. Program Line up – all is can say is that every day our family finds something interesting . It has too many channels that you yourself can’t stop watching.

Aside from my Verizon FiOS TV, my internet connection is faster than it’s ever been and my phone reception, it was excellent. Taking FiOS bundle was a really good decision.

Right now I have nothing to worry about. But till then, once problems start pouring in, that’s when I’ll find out the kind of company I am dealing with, particularly FiOS customer service.