Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

Verizon FIOS High-speed Internet Review

Posted in DSL, Internet by Elliott Back on August 2nd, 2007.

Right now I’m having 15Mb / 2 Mb Verizon FIOS high-speed internet service installed. It’s $49 / mo but available in my new home in Staten Island. Time Warner’s road runner, which I had before, cost me the same after their 6 month introductory price expired, and only offered 7 Mbs down / 384Kbs up. They also had some service issues, occasional downtime, and once they “accidentally” physically disconnected my service.

fios.png

FIOS is interesting, because it’s fiber optic high speed internet. This means they have to physically send people to your home to string fiber. The guys that are here now are nice, fairly professional guys. They strung black fiber down the hallway, drilled a hole in the upper corner of my studio room for the wire, and then strung and stapled the black wire around the room to where they’re going to connect it to their router-like endpoint. After that they just have to splice the wire they strung into the main system running into this building and I’ll have super fast internet.

Looking around the internet, all I see are glowing reviews:

  • “Well I finally had FIOs installed at my house, and let me tell you it is well worth the money!” [src]
  • DSL reports has 637 positive reviews to 22 negative, with six month rating of 85% [src]
  • “If you can get FIOS, its definitely worth the time and hassle to switch. Dealing with their 800 number can be frustrating, but the service quality is still good.” [src]
  • Macworld can’t shut up about how great it is, heh.

The bad reviews are hilariously empty of any real information or complaint, and read like bad trolls:

When it’s working, it’s nice … but right now my 14.4K modem over a noisy tin can string would have better throughput.

In a few minutes when it’s installed I’ll be able to run a speed test for you and let you know if FIOS can, in the short term, deliver the download speed it claims.

Update: It can. Not only does the NYC Speakeasy speed test report 10 Mb/s down and 1.8 Mb/s up, but a popular application like Azureus confirms that you can attain these speeds in real life. Don’t believe? Here’s the proof:

download.png

And that’s with a firewall turned on! Niiiice.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 11:17 am and is tagged with speed internet service, high speed internet service, high speed internet, dsl reports, island time, introductory price, download speed, test report, endpoint, service quality, road runner, mbs, speed test, staten island, throughput, downtime, macworld, trolls, hallway, hassle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

Viewing 4 Comments

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    Verizon's technical support rates a D- on a good day. Responses are generic. I was having throughput problems with my laptop in Dallas. The week before on vacation in Baltimore a POTS line & 56 kb modem spooled up reasonably well for common applications like email, banking, credit card log ins etc. Back to Dallas and time outs, spool up web pages at 160 seconds plus. Tried to use speed optimizer and told me my XP sp2 laptop couldn't access speed optimizer because because speed optimizer only works with 98, 2000 & XP. Same problem with QUICK Support and SYSTEM STATUS except the IE6 on my laptop wasn't recognized. Forray with technical support was useless. Told them I suspected a server problem serious server problem. Guess what? Everything works beautifully at 4:00 am. Regarding download speeds when you finally get connected it is fast. It's that getting connected may mean I'll be drawing Social Security benefits during the wait period.
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    I have had Verizon FIOS for 2+ months. Despite wasting hours with their customer service, my downloads average 300 kbps according to SpeedTest.net. My experience says Verizon FIOS is much, much slower than the cable service I used to have in CT.
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    Well, despite YOUR glowing review, I must speak about the absolute non-professionalism of the techs who installed FiOS in our neighborhood. WITHOUT checking, they would drill through walls with known electrical cables, and my neighbor had to repair a wall himself (the techs said it wasn't their fault his house was damaged) when they decided the best placement for his cablebox was in his living room. He's extremely upset with the entire situation as the box is an eyesore.

    In my parent's house, they installed FiOS in the garage, out of sight, out of mind. We were happy about that. Except... with the TV box the remote for the TV is so poorly programmed, you need to sit down and click STB (for the cable) then power, then TV then power repeatedly to actually turn the TV off. As for the internet? On my wireless laptop, if I move my laptop where it stands, two inches in any direction, my connection stops. Places where my connection was no problem with Adelphia/Time Warner, with a very strong signal, I can't get a signal. At all. I have had NO problems connecting elsewhere, WiFi hotspots, back at my own apartment, etc. I know it's not my computer. I know it's not my wireless card

    And to top off all of this? Verizon was responsible for jackhammering into areas of the street that had been ruled unsafe to do so with stress points in the hillsides.

    Thanks, but I'll pass on Verizon...
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    God, The customer service is do horrible. It will ask you set of 100's of question you endup reaching a wrong department. Same set of questions are asked again and again in vain to reach the wrong department. Why do this people make it so difficult to reach them. Charge me another couple of bux and provide me a good customer service. I wish I had a choice I would have never choosen Verizon....
 

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