It might be significantly more than a few weeks. I doubt the Gov't are going to sign off on it in less than 6 months and might hold it up indeffinitely.
But, as for what to do, if it is cheaper to drop TV and pay the ETF, if you could go TWC WITHOUT signing a contract, you could consider doing that and switching back to Verizon if/when you get tired of being on cable and then possibly be able to get both a contract and a "new customer" discount.
The other question is outages. Its been awhile for cable (as mentioned before), but in my apartment with Comcast I think I had a single outage in a year and it lasted half a day. In my townhouse we'd have an outage at least once a month that would last from a few hours to, I think the longest, about 3 days. Pre-college WAY back in the day living with my parents, we'd have an outage, also about once a month, that would last for hours to a couple of days.
With FIOS for >2yrs in my townhouse we had 4 outages. Two lasted a full day, one a few hours and the other one was someones fault who shoved a realestate sign through our fiber to the curb line. Verizon actually came out the next morning and ran a temp line for 2 weeks before they buried it (it had to go under the sidewalk, so it took them a bit). No charge from them.
In my house we have lost FIOS twice in the last 16 months living here. Once for a few hours, the second time was in a recent ice storm that knocked out power, it fried our Optical Network Terminal, which took the power coming back on to realize it was fried and then Verizon took 2 more days before they could get a tech out to replace it.
Comcast was never anything but poor customer service. Verizon, despite their lofty prices, has always had rather good customer service and their service outages tend to be both shorter duration and dramatically less often than Comcast was.
Verizon has done things like
Them - "Oh, you want to switch your ONT from coax to ethernet...uh...I think we need to send a tech out for that"
Me - "Uh, no. You should be able to do it over the phone from your end"
Them - "Yeahhhhhh...I am not sure about that. I'll schedule a tech to come out tomorrow to do it"
Me - "You aren't going to charge me for this are you!?!"
Them - "Oh, no. We won't charge you at all."
End result, they didn't charge me, the tech called me before showing up to ask what it was I need because they were confused on the service call notes. They dialed it in before they even showed up and switched it. Tech showed up 10 minutes later, asked if it was working, I said yes, they thanked me for the shortest service call they ever had and left.
I am not a fan of Verizon because of their high prices and more than anything their bully attitude (just like the other telecos though) with their positioning towards other companies, even when it impacts their own customers (Netflix). I can't fault their customer service or their actual product in my experience (again, excepting the Netflix peering disputes).
A little of me, for a variety of reasons, none of them good, would actually like to subscribe to Comcast as well, but one of the more basic plans, like the very low end entry level cable internet plan and nothing else. Then run a load balance router for FIOS and Cable. I can't really justify the expense for the added redundancy and the fact that FIOS rarely ever goes out.
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