Fiber to the door, for those lucky enough to have it available, usually does grant a quantum boost in quality. The appropriate comparison for most customers is with DSL, and either one compared to cable companies’ internet service depends on the router infrastructure. Cable companies claim to beat the pants off of DSL but that’s best-case. When all your cable neighbors are downloading, there’s a bottleneck at the router serving them all.
Gotcha. I have this tendency to think of FIOS as cable, even thought FIOS regularly reminds me that it’s not. All I know is that I could never go back. I really noticed the difference at work where we had DSL. It would take forever to download large PDF files from manufacturers. Where at home, I can download entire movies or CD collections in a fraction of the time. I don’t think it took ten whole minutes for the Itunes to completely deliver the entire Beatles catalog, and most of that time was consumed with file housekeeping on my computer’s end.