Verizon FOIS/FIOS

[Elmo T]

My wife has bought into the fiber optic internet from Verizon. They've already run the ditch-witch around the yard and pulled the line to the side of the house. The technician comes on Wednesday to complete the hook-up. Mrs. Elmo has signed up for the 15/2 service.

Now that we are well underway, has anyone else made the jump? Verizon is not offering TV yet, but I assume that will be next.

[oddlycalm]

Been connected to FIOS for a little more than 6 months. The service is incredibly fast and unremarkable aside from that.

Had to give up our longtime local ISP and their wonderful support of course. An overwhelmingly large majority of FIOS customers don't have any trouble, but if you do, don't count on speedy help from Verizon's automated voice response robots of either the machine and human variety.

We still have several copper lines for business voice, fax, etc. so we didn't have to come up with a strategy for power outages of more than 8hrs or whatever the FIOS battery backup provides, but that's a minor issue you may want to give some thought to. The good old 24 volt power won't be coming up the optical connection like it does the copper.

Verizon offers an option of Yahoo or MSN for an ISP but doesn't make clear that you aren't required to select either. This is important as if either of these setup programs hang before completion you will be screwed and Verizon will turn you over to Yahoo or MSN and wish you luck. Don't let the Verizon tech set you up with Yahoo or MSN and you eliminate 90% of what can go wrong.

One final potential gotcha is the router that Verizon supplies is both CAT5 and wireless. Since you can't turn off the wireless portion if you don't use it, you need to make sure you password encrypt it so you neighbors and folks driving by can't log right in.

Even the fastest websites tend to limit each connection to 10mbs or less, so multitasking is the key to really using FIOS to the max. Along the similar lines, while the connection is indeed at 15mbs that doesn't mean the spine of the internet will connect you everywhere that fast. I connect to Seattle and San Francisco area sites at 10-15mbs, but everywhere else is more like 5mbps. Once again, this simply leaves you bandwidth to do other things.

If you avoid the minor pitfalls you'll enjoy the incredible speed and very reliable service. Watch high def streaming video real time, perform multiple high speed downloads at the same time, uploads and downloads at the same time, basically pretty much anything you want you can do.

oc

[RacinM3]

I've got it, works great. It's not like I'm doing 5,000 things at a time so I didn't really need all the bandwidth. I got it for the future offerings and to enhance the value of the house, as we've just undergone a MAJOR remodel and the timing was good since the yards were already all torn up. The price was $5 less a month than I was previously paying for DSL, so I figured "why not". Plus the install was free, and I don't think that's going to be the case forever.

[Elmo T]

OC - Forgive my ignorance, but what is the purpose of Yahoo/MSN with Verizon? Does it just put a fancy front end on the internet for you? I assume I'd still get a "verizon.net" email address I could access here and on the road. I rarely use the Comcast.net site.

They say they'll also switch over all copper wire services to the fiber optic line. We rarely get long power outages so that shouldn't be a concern.

The office is upstairs and so I am assuming they will run a CAT5 line from the basement. We aren't currently wired with CAT5 lines in the house.

[oddlycalm]

You're right, Yahoo and MSN are just front ends and don't actually provide much of anything. They do give you Yahoo or MSN mail addresses which seems redundent. After seeing lots of warnings on Broadband Reports I opted out of the Yahoo or MSN thing, but the installed was on autopilot and damn near did it anyway.

The Verizon email functions well for me and is available as either web based or pop3 for mail programs, so what more does a person need?

Not sure if they will run cat5 in your house, but I doubt it. More likely is that they will put a wireless router where the access comes in from outside, but you should confirm that with them.

Also, just so you aren't surprised there is a rather substantial box that's around 14"x18"x10" deep on the outside of the house and a pair of smaller boxes on the order of 12"x4"x2" on the inside.

The speed is amazing and I'm spoiled forever. Good luck with yours!

oc