Everything written about cord cutting assumes you are leaving a cable company. Fios is fiber, and two things about it change the plan: the coax in your walls may still be carrying your internet after the television service is gone, and the equipment you have to return is a pile of set-top boxes rather than one gateway. Get those two right and the rest is the ordinary cancellation everybody describes.
Our general cord-cutting guide is the provider-neutral order of operations. This page is the Fios-shaped version, and the first step is one most households have never done.
First: go and look at your ONT
The optical network terminal is where the fiber ends and your house begins. It is usually in a basement, a garage, a utility closet or a grey box on an outside wall, and most Fios customers have never consciously looked at it.
You are looking for one thing: what kind of cable leaves the ONT and goes to your router.
If it is a coax cable— the same round screw-on connector a TV antenna uses — your internet is travelling over the coaxial wiring in your house, using MoCA. The TV boxes typically ride that same coax network. This is the common older Fios arrangement, and it means the coax is not free for you to re-purpose after you drop TV, because it is still doing the most important job in the building.
If it is an Ethernet cable, the ONT is handing off directly to the router and the coax in the walls is doing nothing but television. Once TV is gone, that wiring becomes yours — and it has two good second careers, below.
Write down which one you have before you call anybody. Everything else on this page branches off that observation, and it is also the question a support agent will ask you first.
The coax question, which is reversed from cable
On a cable service, the day you cancel television the coax in your walls stops doing anything and becomes the most useful unused asset in the house — a pair of MoCA adapters turns a coax run into a wired Ethernet link that beats any Wi-Fi extender. That is exactly what we tell people to do on the Xfinity page.
On a coax-fed Fios install, that advice is wrong, and following it can take your internet down. Your ONT is already using the coax as a network. Disconnecting legs, swapping the splitter for an unrated one, or fitting a filter in the wrong place can interrupt the path between the ONT and the router.
So the rule for a Fios house is:
Ethernet-fed ONT:once TV is cancelled, the coax is free. Re-purpose it exactly as a former cable customer would — either to carry an antenna signal to several televisions, or as a wired Ethernet backbone for a far room or a mesh node.
Coax-fed ONT: leave the coax network alone. You can still put an antenna up; just run its cable separately to the television rather than injecting it into house wiring that is carrying your internet. If you want a wired link to a far room in this situation, a powerline kit or a mesh system with a wireless backhaul is the sane route.
The equipment return is the expensive part
A cable household usually returns one combined gateway and one or two boxes. A Fios TV household often has a set-top box on every television, each with a remote, and possibly cable cards.
Walk the house and write the list before you cancel: every box, every remote, every card, and the router if you are also dropping the rental. Return the lot in one trip, get a receipt that lists the items, and keep it until two further bills have come and gone clean. Unreturned-equipment charges are the single most common unpleasant surprise at this stage, and the receipt is what settles the argument.
The router question
If you rent the Fios router, that charge survives cancelling television. Whether it is worth replacing depends on the ONT answer from step one.
Ethernet hand-off: straightforward. Your own router plugs into the ONT the way it would plug into a cable modem, you stop paying the rental, and you can put the router somewhere sensible in the house instead of wherever the fiber happened to land.
Coax hand-off: more involved, because a third-party router has no coax WAN port. You either arrange an Ethernet hand-off from the ONT, or put a MoCA adapter in front of your own router to convert the coax to Ethernet. This is a real project rather than an afternoon, and for a lot of households keeping the supplied router is the reasonable call.
Either way, settle it deliberately rather than by default — an equipment rental is the kind of small monthly charge that outlives the service it was attached to. If you do decide to buy, our home router picks cover what to look for, and the specification to match is your plan speed rather than the biggest number on the box.
What replaces the television
Three parts, and only one of them can ever be a monthly bill.
An antenna for the local channels.Check the FCC’s address-level reception tool first — it predicts which stations reach your house and how strongly, which is what should choose the antenna, not a mile figure on a box. In a suburban location an indoor model on a window wall is frequently enough, and our indoor antenna picks are sorted by what your address needs rather than by price. Put it up while the TV service is still live, then run a channel scan properly— the single setting that decides whether a scan finds your stations is Antenna versus Cable, and getting it wrong is the usual reason a working antenna looks broken on day one.
A streaming device on each television.This is the direct replacement for the set-top box, and unlike the box it carries no monthly fee. If the televisions are already smart, you may need fewer of these than you think — we work through when a stick is worth adding to a set that already has apps.
Whichever streaming services you choose to keep. The only recurring cost, and unlike a TV package each one can be cancelled in a minute when the season it was for ends.
Price the gaps honestly before you cancel
The households that reverse a cord-cutting decision almost all reverse it for the same two reasons, and both are predictable in advance.
Regional sports. Over-the-air antennas get you the games carried by the local network affiliates and nothing else. If the household watches a regional sports network, that is a live TV streaming subscription, with a monthly bill that needs to go into your arithmetic before you cancel. Our comparison of the live TV routes sets out what each one actually replaces.
One specific cable channel somebody loves. Audit what the household really watches for two weeks rather than guessing. It is dull and it is the step that makes the difference between a decision that sticks and one that gets undone in March.
And one piece of arithmetic worth doing while you are on the phone: the speed tier. Streaming needs far less than a retention offer implies — the FCC’s own per-activity figures put a 4K stream at 25 Mbps and an HD stream at 5 to 8, so a household running two at once is comfortable well below a gigabit plan. Fios upload speeds are symmetric on most tiers, which is a genuine advantage if anyone in the house takes video calls, and is worth keeping in mind before you downgrade too far.
The order to do it in
One: look at the ONT and note coax or Ethernet. Two: check what your address receives over the air. Three: get the internet-only price confirmed. Four: build the replacement while TV is still connected, and let the household live with it for a week. Five: list every box and card. Six: cancel, return everything in one trip, keep the receipt. Seven: check the next two bills against what you were quoted.
Nothing in that list is difficult. The one step people skip is the first, and it is the one that decides whether the coax in your walls is an asset or a live wire.