Jim, you may be correct about putting the neighborhood on 1 fiber but the capacity of that fiber is of no comparison to the cable infrastructure so it doesn't matter. As for the channel line up I get 260 channels, over 100 in HD. The only thing that didn't match up was the lineup offered to me by Comcast and my just dropped Dish account. On demand appears to have every bit of anything Comcast had to offer. As for the quality, there is a clear difference with FIOS. Our HD isnt compressed like Comcast's or Dish's. I won't deny that techs like yourself bust your butt however that does not equate to the cable company doing anything for me as the consumer other than offer the same services for the last 20 years at an ever increasing cost. As for my old computer, it's 4 years old with PIII processor, 1 GB of memory and 2 mirrored SATAs w/ 80GB each. Bottlenecks caused by pc limitations are almost a thing of the past. I havent always been a Verizon fan either but FIOS is the real deal.