Fee FiOS Foe Fum

The local evening news shows did pieces tonight on Verizon having installed FiOS (pronounced "f-eye-ose") in certain Pennsylvania townships near Philadelphia (Philly itself is still up in the air regarding the service). FiOS stands for Fiber Optic Service and it's essentially Verizon's hope for competing with Comcast in the TV and high speed internet access markets. It's supposed to provide extremely fast internet access and unprecedented picture clarity, especially in hi-def.

All of that is fine and dandy. Heck, I won't even go into my usual anti-Verizon tirade. All I want to know is this—how much speed (for internet) or clarity (for TV images) does one need? Is the improvement so much better that it justifies the cost ($73/month for one package, not including phone service too)? Obviously everyone has to answer that for themselves, but for me the answer is a booming "NO!"

I've seen hi-def TV in stores and at other folks' homes. It's nice. But I don't see where the improvement in image quality comes anywhere close to justifying the increased monthly costs for all eternity, not to mention the one-time costs of a new HD TV and any other special gear that may be required.

I have handy here what I think is a good analogy... Picture a ruler. It's divided into inches, of course, and then the inches are divided into fractions of inches, usually down to 16ths of an inch, possibly even as small as 32nds. Is there much need for smaller subdivisions than that? You could try to mark smaller and smaller intervals, but I don't think it'd be very useful for most people. So that's what all this extra internet speed/image clarity is like in my mind. It's reaching the point where quite simply fast enough is, well, fast enough.

I take a similar view when star athletes hold out for a few extra hundred thousand dollars, or even a million, per year. I mean, dude, come on... How much money does one person need? (To forestall some arguments I'll grant that yes, many do good charitable work and/or make significant charitable donations. And yes, I know athletes have short careers. But I'm talking about the absolute stars, the ones who make in a year what 99.9999% of folks could retire on and live out their days without ever coming close to spending a significant fraction of it.)

Anyway, back to Verizon and FiOS and such... These Giga-corporations (they've gone beyond "Mega-") are always looking for ways to up the ante and convince folks to pay more per month. I just wish that people would start realizing this is all just artificial revenue generation (and hype) and stand up against it, even if just a little bit. I have a 13" regular TV with old-fashioned antenna input, so what I see is free (unless you factor in electricity). The setup serves me well. I'm not that interested in what I've seen on cable TV elsewhere, so the 10 or so over-the-air channels I receive are fine by me. I'm sure I'm very unusual in that view, but so be it. I can live with that.