Cincinnati Bell FiOptics - a year later

We are coming up on a year since my original FiOptics install and I wanted to build another post around that. The FiOptics posts get a lot of traffic and we continue to receive comments on these posts regularly, even though the last post is dated February of this year.

Since that last post we have purchased a new condo in the Gateway Quarter and I was able to have my Cincinnati Bell FiOptics service transferred to our new place from Clifton. That in itself turned into a huge headache, but I think it was primary because it is a new service and at the time nobody had transferred their service before and the processes weren't 100% worked out. Anyway, after some headaches, mis-scheduled techs and confusion we got it moved and the tech they eventually sent out was a really good and really helpful getting things sorted out and had me back online in about 20 minutes.

Just as with our previous install, this one has been pretty rock solid. The internet rarely, if ever goes down, and if it does it is back up within minutes vs HOURS of downtime we quite often experienced with Time Warner Cable.

The internet is killer, 20Mb service and it screams. Everyone loves that part.

The part everyone continues to hate is the television service. The DVR GUI is still pretty buggy, even after some minor updates (it's maybe 10% less horrible than it was). The on-demand functionality continues to be a headache for most people. Ours works... sometimes, more than often requires a reboot and even then it's ungodly slow to load, if it loads.

I think the real issue is that most of us are coming from well developed and established television services. The DVRs from Time Warner and DIRECTV are well polished and mature products. On it's own, Cincinnati Bell's television service does the basics and does them well enough. We aren't in a walled garden though and when you come from a service on another provider that is polished and mature, that is where the CB stuff really looks bad. It's like going from your iPhone to a Motorola StarTac. Does it work? Sure. Does it do what is advertised? I suppose. How's it compare to that iPhone you had? It doesn't, and thats the problem here.

Because of some of my ranting on here and on Twitter I got a couple GUI/firmware and DVR hardware upgrades early, however at this point the software you have on your stuff is the same as mine and we all know it's not much of an upgrade. It did fix a few a few bugs that were pretty significant and I'm glad Cincinnati Bell was on that. The question though is what is next, because this service still is lacking when you start comparing it to the competition. From some recent comments it sounds like CB may be moving to Motorola DVRs, however I am assuming the software is more or less the same as the Cisco boxes.

Right now there's a debate in our condo building about this very topic and the solution some are looking at are DIRECTV. I'm not a fan of satellite dishes or having to swap services, but the DVR is really bugging people and they're getting tired of waiting. DIRECTV even has an iPhone app that lets you control it from anywhere. Very cool stuff.

I'd like to clarify that the problems with the Cincinnati Bell DVR is more than GUI deep. I was told a few stories by CB techs that people would cancel the service upon seeing the GUI because they thought it was ugly, or something along those lines. I think that's a rather idiotic thing to do without even trying it, as it's pretty much the same GUI as Time Warner had maybe 5 years ago. Could the GUI be better? Sure, but to me there are more serious problems with functionality, stability and usability that trump an ugly GUI. A few problems I've had lately are just the overall lag in moving between menu's and options. It used to be a whole lot worse, but it's 2010 and I think our expectations on anything digital are much much higher than they used to be. If Apple can squeeze everything an iPhone can do into a device the size of my palm, certainly a device as bit as a DVR can be faster and smoother and more reliable.

I really hope Cincinnati Bell is listening to its customers, reading the blog posts, the comments and various reviews. There's a lot of good feedback out there and based on my contact with Cincinnati Bell I'm sure they are doing just that. I just wonder what the next move is gonna look like for this service and if it will come in time for some of their customers.

website: http://cincinnatibell.com/fioptics/

Cincinnati Bell FiOptics - long term review

If you know me in real life, or follow my twitter you probably know I can be a harsh critic of products or services that don't live up to my expectations. Nobody is safe from my trashing, my scorn, my tongue-in-cheek commentary - even my beloved Apple (cough, Apple TV, cough).

It's even worse when you're a service I rely on for my internet connection that allows me to unleash that scorn upon the twitterverse.

Cincinnati Bell has probably been the target of a lot of that over the past six months - they may see it as an assault - I see it as tough love. The folks who monitor the @CincyBell twitter account probably disagree, but luckily some people higher up see it differently and have chosen to engage with me about my concerns and my previous blog posts, and I get to share with you some of fruits of those conversations.

First - I think we all agree the internet side of FiOptics is a rock star. It is fast, stable and did I mention fast? I think their Westell router is a piece of crap (remember the Cisco 675?) - but I also work in a data center, so my standards for equipment may be too high, and my dreams of Cincinnati Bell just giving me an ethernet hand off for my own router is probably unrealistic.

Second - again, something I think all FiOptics customers universally can agree upon - the DVR GUI is flat out awful. It's like 1992 threw up inside the device.

The good news is that this is not the shape of things to come - they're reading our tweets, our blog posts and improvements are coming.

I've been asked to hold back some details, but Cincinnati Bell FiOptics customers can rest assured that change is coming, and it should all occur in 2010. The first upgrade is an update to the current software - I'm not sure what all it addresses, but it should be a step forward, and really, anything would be an improvement.

The second upgrade is a big one and the one I can't really give many details on - trust me though, it is very cool and is a total replacement of the current DVR software. The functionality is slick and on par with anything else out there, possibly better and should make everyone pretty happy, and they're hoping for a 2010 rollout.

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.

Cincinnati Bell gives Cincinnati a 21st century upgrade

When it comes to telecommunications, Cincinnati stands out a bit in the way it is set up and maintained. While most major cities are served by Verizon or AT&T (or one of their holdings), Cincinnati is served by Cincinnati Bell (CB), one of the few regional and independent carriers left. While other cities had to live through the telco buy-outs and merges over the last couple decades, we were left with a familiar face and very little change.

Over the years Cincinnati has benefited from this in terms of services like Zoomtown and Fuse internet, and Cincinnati Bell Wireless which delivered high speed data to our homes and mobile devices.

The downside of this familar face and stability was an aging telecommunications infrastructure due to a lack of competition and innovation. The old copper systems have their limits and as the city grew and as our internet usage and needs grew, Cincinnati Bell had to change and grow with them.

You may have heard of other cities beginning to be able to order something called 'Fios', which is fiber optic service to the home. This allows the communications providers to start delivering a new class of service to the house, one that is not limited by an aging infrastructure and the limitation of last-mile copper connections. This means faster internet connections and an alternative to cable and satellite tv.

Cincinnati Bell has begun to roll out this upgrade in the form of their FiOptics product, which I am lucky enough to be part of. My FiOptics were installed this week and I want to break down my initial impressions as well as a comparison to my previous service with Time Warner Cable (TWC).

With more and more services becoming web-based there's an increasing need for faster internet connections at home. There are a few options in town, but the majority of us are either using Cincinnati Bell's Zoomtown or Time Warner Cable's RoadRunner service. Both are good, and keep bumping their speeds, but both also have some serious drawbacks and technical limitations.

Zoomtown is a DSL service, which means your speeds greatly vary depending on your proximity to your central office (CO). Cincinnati Bell sells it with speeds up to 5Mbps, but unless you're close to the CO you're more likely going to train up at less than that. Distance and line quality matter greatly with DSL-based services, as do the age and quality of your home's phone wiring.

RoadRunner uses the coaxial cables that your TV already runs over, which allows them to promise much greater speeds, however in most instances cable modem services operate on a shared bandwidth model. Your entire neighborhood or area is sharing the same wires, the same switching systems, so you can definitely run into issues where the tubes get a bit crowded.

FiOptics has neither of these limitations - what Cincinnati Bell is doing is replacing Cincinnati's aging copper infrastructure with fiber optics. This eliminates the bottlenecks in the network and the issues around CO distances. The last mile to your house is now fiber and your connection to the CO and subsequently Cincinnati Bell's main systems is literally the speed of light. It's also still a DSL type system so there's no share bandwidth bottlenecks. The speeds start at 10Mbps and go up from there and is really has no limits (besides what CB will actually sell you). Cincinnati Bell is also delivering TV over this network since they now have the infrastructure to support it and we now have another option in Cincinnati when it comes to our television needs.

Price-wise, it's a no brainer. FiOptics with a similar setup to your existing Time Warner cable/internet package will be cheaper. In my case it is $50 cheaper a month, and I'm getting faster internet out of it. The TV service is more or less the same, but as this is a brand new service early adopters are going to have to endure some growing pains:

• The channel line-up isn't apple-to-apple with TWC. It's close enough, but if you're a real TV junkie, check the listings before you buy.
  
  
• On-demand channels and content pales in comparison to TWC. Again, it might be a big deal to you, it might not.
  
  
• While the CB dvr/box (Cisco Explorer 8540HDC) is better than TWC, the interface isn't quite as pretty and some functionality is missing (or I just haven't found it yet)
  

Cincinnati Bell FiOptics also still uses your houses internal coaxial wiring, so there's no need for new jacks or holes in your wall. They run the fiber optics box to your house's demarc and simply plug your existing cable lines into their box.

Hands down the FiOptics internet connection is better. The latency is non-existent, and the speeds are top notch. I opted for the 20Mbps service and Speedtest.net results comes back more or less on-par with that. One note I will make is that the internet side of your FiOptics still runs over your home's phone line (just inside your house), so make sure your wiring is good. Most new places use CAT5 and should be totally fine, but if you have old wiring, might want to have it verified. Chances are if you already have Zoomtown it's nothing to worry about. Just remember, it's fiber to your house, not to your bedroom.

The service area is currently very limited as Cincinnati Bell slowly re-wires the entire city; however, if you are lucky enough to be in a building being wired, I say go for it. Links are below where you can check your address, but chances are if you are in a house or complex that is FiOptics ready, CB is already knocking on your door. They are aggressively marketing this product to anyone and everyone who is eligible.

Cincinnati Bell FiOptics page - http://www.cincinnatibell.com/fioptics/

Time Warner Cincinnati - http://www.timewarnercable.com/cincinnati/