Yesterday, Verizon's contractor went down my street marking cable locations and hanging fliers on the door to indicate that they were about to pull the remaining infrastructure required to get Verizon's new FIOS service. I can't wait. It will finally be a decent alternative to the cable company and my cable modem.

http://www.verizon.com/fios in order to read more about it.

It's not so much the additional speed I'll be happy about (though it certainly doesn't hurt). I'm hoping that Verizon engineered FIOS like they have all their other telecommunications services - with over engineered infrastructure that will hopefully be more robust than that of Comcast. For all the good things about Comcast's service, I'm now tired of the 1-2 hour outages I experience every few weeks or so as the service mysteriously goes down in the middle of the day. These events have become frequent enough that I've gotten a DSL line as a backup to the cable modem. So I can keep working through these outages.

Check back here as I provide updates. As much as being first usually means being on the bleeding edge, I'll probably be first (yet again) to get some sort of new internet technology to my house. (I was first in my neighborhood in California for ISDN. I was first in my neighborhood in Pennsylvania for DSL. Why not be first in the neighborhood for FIOS?)