Here at Independent Sources South Verizon paid a visit today to install FiOS — their fiber-to-the-home product that promises fast internet connections and, down the road, a competitor to cable and satellite distributors of TV programming.

The good news — it works and it’s fast. Testing using the tools at DSLreports.com, I have a little under the claimed 5 mb / sec upload speed (4.9), but a little over the 1.5 mb / sec upload speed (1.7). Looking at other’s results in my area, this is a consistent pattern. I can live with that.

They offer other packages with higher speed (next higher is 15 down / 2 up).

The installation took about four hours. They replace the old wires from the telephone pole with a fiber optic cable, install a fiber optic terminal that handles phone, network, and TV connections, hook that to a battery backup, then move your existing phone wires to the new fiber optic box. They also run ethernet to a single point inside the house and provide you with a wireless + wired router to stick at the end of it. The wiring and installation of the boxes is very professional looking.

Although when I was researching FiOS I read about the boxes being installed outside the house, they put mine in the garage, just inside the power / old phone utility cabinet:

(click for a slightly larger view)

The bad news … when they extended the house phone wiring to reach the new fiber optic terminal, they created a short that creates so much white noise on the voice lines that they are unusable. They will be out Monday morning to fix it. To their credit — a little — they did not put up any fuss about this being an “inside wiring” problem. My fault for not checking the voice lines before the technician left (my guess is that the technician did not have to check the voice lines inside — he probably did check the voice at the fiber optic terminal, where it is OK, and left it at that).

This marks the fifth means I’ve used to connect to the internet in this house … modem, ISDN, cable, DSL, and now FiOS. Fiber looks to have some longevity … at least until WiMax comes around …

Update: Verizon came out Monday AM as promised. Turns out the problem was my old DSL box, which was still plugged into the phone line. The clue: the technician listened to the white noise and said it “sounds like DSL.” Good ears! It wasn’t Verizon’s fault — they weren’t my DSL provider and didn’t know the box was there.

Technorati Tags: FiOS, fiber, Verizon, Verizon FiOS

This entry was posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 7:27 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Off Topic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.