New VMS/IPC boxes - speed and pricing
lifeofbean
Newbie

For the most part, I've been a very happy FiOS customer. The internet side has gone out exactly once in the year I've had the service, and it was restored within an hour. TV has dropped out twice, both times very late at night (I assume for head-end maintenance). Reliability is better than every other ISP I've ever had, combined.

That said..

I wanted to snag another STB for the house - found out the local stores had all been closed (I can understand why from the financial aspect, but it was still a shock pulling up to my old store to pick up another STB.. and finding a "for lease" sign, when I'd been by there 2 months prior), so I looked at options online. The new VMS + IPC boxes looked promising, especially since they added the ability for the entire house to pause, rewind, schedule recordings, etc, from any TV - instead of only the DVR being able to do that (though the old boxes could stream recordings from the DVR).

My chief complaint so far - while the VMS box itself is responsive, the IPC boxes are painfully slow to respond to anything. Picture quality is fantastic, but using them feels, to put it in nerd terms, like using a Pentium 90 with Windows XP and 128MB RAM. They take 5+ to respond to anything more than a channel change (and even that takes up to 3 seconds), and frequently "lose" remote key presses if you try to, say, hit guide, hit page down, then try to arrow down to the channel that you know is on the next page. It literally feels like a throwback to the earliest digital set top boxes from Comcast/Time Warner - the first ones with built-in TV listings in the mid 1990s. The speed is right on par with them; the only thing faster right now is they don't shut down for 30 minutes a day to update the TV listings.

I've gone through the built-in diagnostics on the boxes to verify signal levels - they're decent (not perfect, but this is a 20 year old house with mostly original coax), but we have no pixelation or picture drop-out, so I would think they could carry the basic stuff between the IPC boxes and VMS pretty easily. The router certainly has no problem handling the 75/35 on the same coax (speedtest shows 85-90 down, 35-40 up, with a ~5ms ping, no matter which cable outlet it's plugged into)..

My other complaint - why did Verizon move to "rooms" for pricing? I thought I was getting a DVR plus 3 STBs (since I ordered 3 STBs and asked for a DVR), instead of a VMS + 2 STBs - and I'm paying much more than I did for the old DVR + 2 STBs.

With the griping out of the way - is there a reasonable chance that firmware updates will help with the speed of the IPC boxes? Or is there a chance it's a cabling issue? (I have no problem pulling new coax or cat5e, and I can provide signal levels if that'll help) If not, is there any chance of getting the old QIP7232 DVR + QIP7100 box back (and adding another 7100), and switching back to what I was paying before? I know they're a bit antiquated (especially the 7100s), but they were much more responsive, and didn't make me want to throw the STBs through the window. It just seems really rediculous that I'm paying such a large premium (plus the "upgrade fee") for equipment that, in terms of the user experience, is much worse.

Again.. been a happy customer for a long time, but the new terminals are super painful to use.

Thanks.

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Re: New VMS/IPC boxes - speed and pricing
joker211
Contributor - Level 1

If this is the case.  I think I will wait till the bugs are worked out

Question what were you paying before and after for the boxes.   So what was the old DVR + 2 STB's and the new DVR plus 2 stb's

Trying to get an idea of what you meant by way more.  Most people said same pricing and a small $20 or so upgrade fee

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