We've switched to Verizon FiOS

After plenty of debate (all inside my bald little head), I finally signed up for Verizon FiOS on Wednesday the week before last. David from Verizon came out on Friday of that week and got us up and running. Here are a few pics showing (from left to right - click a thumbnail to see larger image) the line to the house (it was buried on the following Monday), the box on outside of the house, additions inside the garage, and the modem/router (an Actiontec MI424-WR).

Being a control freak, I asked David to just get the connection working (he was able to use our existing internal coax, and our BrightHouse connection for TV still works fine, since it's different bandwidths). I was then able to turn off broadcast of the SSID, enable MAC address filtering, and turn off WEP and turn on WPA encryption. On the PC side, the speed initially was rather poor (better than it had been before, but not by much - except on upload which was now 4Mbps+). But after downloading and running TCPOptimizer, I am now seeing between 14Mbps and 18Mbps download ...from Verizon's test site. Here's the result from Verizon's speedtest:

Suh-weet!

Comments

[Barry in Portland]

I downloaded TCPOptimizer, and it sure is easy to use. Just rebooted - now to see if there's a noticeable difference!

[Doug Pratt]

I've had FiOS Internet and phone for nearly 18 months, and recently had FiOS TV added. This is truly great stuff!

I've had zero Net downtime, compared to many outages with Comcast, my previous service, including an entire month with e-mail and nothing else, that turned out to have been a dead gateway.

[Dave]

Joe, I've had FIOS for about 6 months too and love it. However, is your input network cable for the Internet itself hardwired to the house box? I'm in a situation where it seems as though the standard LAN cable feeding me the Internet may have gone bad (as determined by troubleshooting).

Normally I'd go down to the local Staples and pick me up a replacement cable for five bucks and be done with it. However, being wired to the house box (which, in my case, is outside) the entire cable has to be replaced and possibly re-fed through a small hole in the house wall! If I'm right it's going to turn a $5 job into a $100 service call. I'm working with Verizon on it now but I was curious if your arrangement was the same.

[Joe Litton]

Dave,

First off, as Doug and you both state, the FiOS service has been great! We've got consistent high bandwidth and aside from having to power cycle the modem one time (very minor), there have been zero issues.

Regarding the connection: I believe the Verizon line comes to a box on the outside of the house. Since we continue to use cable for tv, there is a device that then combines the FiOS line and the cable line and connects that (still from that box outside the house) to the coax feed for the house.

But all is not necessarily lost for you! It is quite possible that the one or more connectors on the coax are bad. We'd had problems that were finally found to be 6 poorly-installed connectors on coax lines when the house was built. In our utility room off the garage, there's a cabling box that serves as kind of a wiring hub for the house. The main coax line from the garage wall eventually ends up in this box, and then there are connections to branch the feed out to the various rooms. After the connectors were replaced on 6 of these lines, our problems disappeared. The issue was that the coax was not pushed all of the way into the barrel of the connector. So... depending on how accessible your cabling is, you may be able to buy some connectors and a crimping tool and do the job yourself ...and have the tool for future use :)