I recently moved to Keller, Texas which is actually the first city ever to get Verizon's fiber optic service, FIOS.  My street originally wasn't wired for it, so I had to make do with 10mb DSL with a local company.  When Verizon notified me FIOS was finally available for my house, I jumped on it.  I've now had it for a couple of months and I haven't had a single outage, and check out my speed below!

The reason I bring this up is because I noticed Scott Hanselman just posted about getting FIOS tv and in an earlier post, he actually ditches his DD-WRT router and goes with the Actiontec router Verizon provides.  Like him, I refused to give up my Buffalo router flashed with DD-WRT but a couple of weeks ago, I replaced DD-WRT with Tomato because I was having wireless connection issues in my living room.  While the signal remained strong according to Windows XP, my throughput was less than 1mb.  I replaced DD-WRT with Tomato hoping it would solve the issues, and it did. 

But after I read Scott's blog, I decided to give the Actiontec a try and it actually surprised me with the amount of features available.  Everything I used DD-WRT for (QoS primarily), the Actiontec provided.  Not only does it seem faster than the Buffalo with DD-WRT/Tomato firmware, the wireless signal seems to be alot stronger as well with nary a deadspot in my living room.

So I guess the moral of this story (aside from showing off my swanky broadband connection) is don't be a software/hardware snob.  My initial resistance to using the Actiontec was because I figured it was generic junk that ISP's provide for their users, and that the freeware DD-WRT and Tomato firmwares (with source code available) were superior products.  This is akin to only using open source .NET software tools and refusing to use Microsoft provided ones even if maybe... just maybe... the Microsoft version may be better!