Yesterday Verizon came to install FIOS in our house. We were paying a ton of money to Speakeasy for DSL (who I still like, and who has good support, but who is kind of expensive), Comcast for both a backup cable modem and digital cable, and Verizon for phone service. We bought the "triple play" or whatever it's called from Verizon which included the same phone service, digital cable service, and an amazing 20Mbit/5Mbit fiber internet service. It also included a monsterous (and complicated) wireless router.
The FIOS guy (Bill) spent from 10 AM to about 7:30 PM here setting everything up. Most of that time was spent figuring out how to get the wiring right. They had to connect up to my phone block and my network and my cable, all of which terminate in my work room, but are nowhere near the old phone block. Once i suggested moving the FIOS ONT (Optical Network Terminal) box away from the old spot, Bill suggested a place where they could punch through the wall and run everything easily. They had a few minor glitches, and poor Bill was saddled with a total newbie for this complicated install which didn't speed things up, to be sure, but ultimately they got things installed and running. Everything works incredibly well so far. The internet is exactly as advertized, 20/5. It's blazing. Kim said it felt like the web pages were locally cached they loaded so quickly, and I have to agree. Their DNS must be rocking too because it's really amazingly fast.
It took me about 15 seconds to get the entire feed for a 6 minute YouTube video last night. I'm only having 2 issues. First, I can not get DHCP working on the router. As far as I can tell, it's set up correctly, but it just won't allocate DHCP for some reason. No idea why. Static IPs work fine, so we're using that for now. The second issue is that there's one dead spot in my house, but it's a place I use my laptop all the time so I'll have to add a second wireless access point to the network to beef up that area.
Otherwise, FIOS is very very sweet. Of course, I haven't had to call Verizon yet...we'll see if I'm cursing them at that point.
