Harcey's Identity: Derrick Harcey's Weblog

Results

I now have the FIOS service installed. The speed tests after installation varied greatly, but here is a recent test to compare to the before tests:

Again, using the speed testing tools at DSLreports.com, I measured the line speed on my current connection to / from various locations arround the US. The result:

• SF - 5,532 down / 1,758 up
• LA - 5,674 down / 1,762 up
• DAL - 10,832 down / 1,771 up
• CHI - 8,053 down / 1,767 up

Satisfaction

While I wanted to see a 10x performance boost over the before numbers on both the upload and the download speed, The download speed varies greatly (by time of day and all other variable factors with the internet in general). The real positive note here is the upload speed seems to be pretty consistent and greater than 10x the performance. Since my original problem was the upload bandwidth when using Vonage VOIP and WebEx, this is a huge improvement. Further testing and experience is required to see if the latency is a factor. I did no pre tests and have not done any post latency tests yet. I did use my Vonage after installation, and all was well.

experience

The installation took about 4 hours, and was very straight forward (with one exception). A few devices were installed in the garage (an ONT - Optical Network Terminal and a BBU - Battery Backup Unit). Then a cat5 cable was run from the garage into the den. The phone lines are also run over the optical network and connect now through the ONT. The battery backup is supposed to keep the phones lines active for 4 hours in the event of a power failure. The cat5 cable which comes into the den is terminated to a D-Link Broadband Router (supplied by Verizon). This removes my dependency on the DSL modem and allows be to use my existing router (supplied by Vonage) if I choose to. My understanding is that the WAN side just needs to support PPPoE. That's a project for a different day. Now the problem I alluded to earlier. The fiber which was buried in my lawn last week did not work. I was told it was either defective or damaged during installation. They had used several Ditch Withces to do the installation and were supplying a great deal of force on the cable with a winch during the installation so my guess is it is the latter. In any even, Verizon was great in this situation. They called in a crew to bury a new cable and immediately place a temporary cable above ground so I was not out of service during the work. They buried a new cable in a few hours (this time, I noticed, using more manual labor than Ditch Witches and winches). Then the technician came back out at the end of the day and switched from the temporary fiber to the newly buried one, and all was well. My lawn is a bit more tore up now since the second cable was laid, but it will grow out and is a small price to pay for the results.