Switch back to Spectrum after TEN years with Fios?

[Chet-NYC1]

A Christmas Rant for Verizon. When I had my Fios TV installed in June 2008- almost ten years ago- the installer said I was one of the first people in NYC to have the service installed- and that was a couple years after having Fios internet in my house. I was very happy to dump Time Warner Cable. Now, almost ten years later, I may have no choice to but to move back to what is now Spectrum.

Back in June 2017, I had my mother-in-law's cable service moved from Spectrum to Fios. The result was a monthly bill that was $40 less than what she was paying Spectrum. She has three movie channels, Quantum router, 150/mbps internet, two DVRs and she pays $20 less than I do- with one DVR, 75Mbps internet, two movie channels and a regular router.

Today, I went to the Spectrum website, and from them I can get a DVR, five premium channels, 400Mbps internet, a pile of HD channels that Fios just refuses after years to offer (like C-SpanHD or BBC World News HD) for about ten dollars LESS than I pay Verizon now. It is beyond appalling that one can be a customer for literally a decade and Verizon could not give a tinker's **bleep** about that loyalty. They send me all sorts of mail and emails about special deals. I check them out and they are all worthless. If I were to upgrade my current Fios service to what Spectrum is offering me as a new customer, it would come close to a $300 a month bill. The Spectrum bill would be about $165.00.

Now, I'm under no illusions that after a couple of years with Spectrum, they would do exactly the same. The prices would go up. The technology would improve but there would be no break whatsoever for an existing customer. That doesn't mean as a customer we should be angry as all hell about this treatment.

There is simply no reason that Gigabit internet for anyone who has been a customer as long as I have should be $60 more a month. That is absurd. Truth is, I don't even need speeds that level- a Quantum router and 150 or 300 Mbps would suit my needs just fine. (Even that is $30 more a month!)

Then there is channel listing. Why don't we have things like NASA TV, or BBC World in HD? Why do we keep getting more useless shopping channels or propaganda channels like One America News which spouts stuff closer to conspiracy theories than actual news? I haven't seen a major improvement in channel selections in years.

I've been incredibly tolerant of all of this for a long time, but as is often said, everything has a breaking point. It kills me to see new customers getting two or three times as much from Verizon, for almost half the price that I pay. I am certain there are thousands of other Fios customers who the same way.

PS- I never got my 10,000 reward points for referring my mother-in-law's account. I can't even get the reward points I'm owed.