You're impressionable.:D

London has only just getting FIOS and that's central London.

Personally, I'm stuck on 8mb/1mb coming down my phone line and that's on a good day. There's not even a cable infrastructure within 200 miles of me.:damn:

I agreee the UK is well behind the rest of the world. ISPs are still charging extortionate rates for net service while advertising speeds that are not obtainable. I pay £24.99 a month for a 30GB (fair usage) monthly cap and I'm lucky if I can maintain 4mb/512kb. LOL

Laugh if you must.:rotfl: I welcome FIOS with open arms.:/\\k:

Well FIOS (which is a Verizon branded name. It will probably be called something else in the UK) is not all its cracked up to be though - my one biggest complaint with it - they block both port 80, port 25, and port 21 which means no web servers except on non standard ports and same goes with no FTP unless it is on non standard ports. SMTP is a no go because of a lacking port 25. They force you to pay more for the biz package if you plan to use those services and host them at home on standard ports.

I can sort of see why though - 5 MBit/sec upload would / will make a great server pipe.

-S

It's not quite nationwide yet. I've had it available for almost 2 years now in my neighborhood. Just haven't gotten around to making the switch, but I'll probably make the jump after my wife and I move here in the next 6 months. There are vast areas of Portland that still don't have FIOS available yet and several friends of mine in the Seattle area have been patiently waiting for it for close to a year now. If you live out anywhere close to being rural you can forget about it.

Rural - that is exactly where they seem to have the most of it. In the last year, it has been rolled out almost everywhere. Seattle has it, Everett has it, and I know people in Portland with it. Your friends must be on the fringe somewhere.

-S

In all honesty I could care less at this format war. Technology progresses too fast anymore and optical media will be a thing of the past a few years down the road. I will eagerly look forward to IPTV and the benefits it will bring.

That's kinda the point as I see it. For most people, digital download is still a few, if not many years away. So enjoy today's tech in the meantime. When we finally attain as a whole, those sorts of speeds, they ain't gonna be free. Not here anyway.

I see IPTV as quite common in about 10 years. It will take a while to catch on but we are seeing the birth of it now as TV networks begin to offer their shows on the web. I think a lot of the writers guild strike concessions probably set the writers up to get money from new outlets as they become commonplace. Once more and more people begin to catch on that they aren't limited to watching a TV show when the network broadcasts it will change many peoples lives. Tivo and DVRs have begun the revolution.

Our children will laugh at us when we tell them we got our tv through dedicated cable services or big analog broadcast antennas and bought movies in stores on DVDs.

Actually one of my friends in Washington is in Everett but his neighborhood doesn’t have the FIOS available. The other two are in Renton and Mukilteo. In the Portland area, my parents live on the west hills overlooking Portland and FIOS isn’t available yet, Verizon is stating early April. I live about 10 miles further out, so I wouldn’t call my examples as rural or on the fringe. I’m sure within a year Verizon will get all the pockets taken care of though.