I was surprised to see that our FIOS box power button does absolutely nothing. After you turn it off, it's still recording two channels, so when you turn it back on, you can rewind and watch the last hour of the current channel and the last channel you were on. It also constantly shows a "Press the menu button to turn on FIOS", so that consumers don't get confused when they power on the TV but not the STB.

Basically, the power button is completely pointless. I might as well leave the system fully on all of the time.

If you unplug the box, it takes about 90 seconds to bring the system back.

It doesn't seem impossible to program a state where the box is sleeping, but ready to wake to record scheduled shows, etc. Of course, that would still take phantom power, but at least it wouldn't be running full-blast all the time.