life with Cincinnati Bell's FiOptics

It's been a bit over a week now with my new Cincinnati Bell FiOptics service and I want to post some follow-up to my experience and things I've learned in the past week.

First, the internet is still great. 20Mbps up/down is still hands down the winner vs Time Warner or anyone else in town. For the price you can't beat it. No complaints there at all. If you can get it, I highly recommend it. No issues with latency or service drops, which I'm impressed by since there seem to be Cincinnati Bell trucks outside my place every other day.

On the television side... I'm still undecided about it. The DVR's disk space seems a bit lacking compared to Time Warner, and the UI on their guide and the overall interface is pretty unclear and dated-looking.

Stability wise, the TV service seems OK... however it took us a while to get 'on-demand' programming working and it seems seems quite slow to load (and has a horrible UI). I've also been having a few random issues with certain standard definition channels not displaying on my TV and some guide outages here and there.

In terms of the DVR, Cincinnati Bell never really gave me an hour count on what it would hold, but they said it was 'bigger' and 'better' than Time Warner. My first recording said it took 17% of the DVR's space, but now after 6 recordings (around 5 hours of HD content) it is reading 28% full. The device seems wildly inconsistent with how much disk space content takes, or that it reports. Because of this I still have no idea how much it will actually hold and I've probably driven the CB rep in my building to never speak to me again. For comparison, Time Warner states their box will hold something in the realm of 80 hours of standard definition TV and 35 hours of HD, which is about on par with my experience.

I queried some of my neighbors about the issues and concerns I've had and they're seeing more or less the same with their service, and also echo my feelings on the horrible UI and lack of, or unclear, DVR functionality.

I relayed my concerns to Cincinnati Bell via my rep and one of the heads of the FiOptics team gave me the following bits of info:

1. Disk Usage - may be higher with CB since they are not compressing their signal as much as Time Warner, the result is a better picture (in theory) but also recordings take more space, up to 4x that of standard definition.
   
   
2. UI - they're planning to roll out a new interface 1st quarter 2010 - this is something Cisco is developing and should be a cleaner and more user friendly UI.

Overall I'm happy with the internet service, and taking a wait-and-see attitude with the TV service as I get more comfortable with it and work through some of the irregularities and bugs I am seeing.

My suggestion to anyone who has FiOptics as an option is to do your homework and make sure you're getting an apples-to-apples comparison. Get out your current bill and make sure it matches up, make sure your channel lineups match and see if you can get a more concrete answer on the DVR space.