Verizon FIOS High-speed Internet Review
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 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:
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. |
8 Responses to “Verizon FIOS High-speed Internet Review”
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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.
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.
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…
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….
I have Verizon Fios in my apartment (Maryland). It took some time to get the network installed in buildings that were clearly overbuilt but after the initial headache of laying the conduit in the walls, the rest of the installation was smooth. Had the service for about a year now. The Fios TV is OUTSTANDING… the FIos internet is INCREADIBLE. I have the 20/5 speed package and consistantly peg the network at that speed. There has been ZERO down time since it was installed. The other reviews are correct when they say the 800 number / customer service / can be a tad frustrating but let's deal with facts.. is Comcast any better? I think not. Well worth it guys.. grab it if ya can.
Honostly verizon is not a good service in my opinion. The technician who set up the cable box in my room uplugged my modem and my tv tuner and used my computer without my knowledge and left me to clean up his mess for 1. My family actually switched over from comcast. Who ever agrees with verizon FIOS that you get faster speeds then comcast, you are dead wrong. My speeds dropped 10mbs download and 6mbs upload switching over. The router/modem is a bad choice with low range and cannot handle more than 2 connections at once. Sometimes the wireless assistant in the router has actually crashed due to “overload” of connections in the router and that is a load of ****. That’s another thing with the router/modem…..you cannot buy a better router to connect to the modem/router like in comcast, since verizon decided to combine both a router and a modem together you can’t upgrade your range easily. I find that a HUGE engineering flaw on their part because for people who actually know a thing or two about computers and electronics cannot easily upgrade, we still can upgrade the range but not as well as buying a more supported router, alls we can do is maybe uprade the attena for more range. If anyone has checked speed tests, they should know comcast boost is actually much faster than verizon, even with a direct connection to the verizon modem, comcast wins. I used to recieve 2200 kb/s on my downloads from websites, now i recieve a mere 300 kb/s taking almost an additional hour longer for many files. As well as my download speeds, videos that used to take mere minutes to load, take 2 + hours now with verizon (megavideo.com). I also find the Verizon FIOS TV very unorganized menus and very low detail into the menus compared to comcast with from what i see more to offer and much more organized. My friend now has verizon workers in his neighboorhood, just installing the FIOS cables in the yard, they don’t ask the people in the neighboorhood they just do it, and the day they were working in his yard…..his comcast internet was dropped and they just go around marking your lawns throughout the neighboorhood without permission from the actual residents. Every logical and well informed technology orianted person i know (more than u would expect) all have the same opinion as I to verizon, I have never heard a good review about Verizon FIOS personally and I have asked many people about it, all complete **** reviews. I will admit Verizon Wireless for cell phones is very successful and well organized and just incredible, but as far as verizon internet and Television, I find many engineering flaws in both and do not understand their resoning and how they expect to compete with comcast with how their systems work. Anyway that’s my rant, if you actually read all this good for you. Please no hate comments, this is merely my own opinion.
All I have to say is that it is very simple to plug in a third-party router and create an entirely different network for your internet. I have Verizon FIOS with an Apple Airport Extreme connected to it, and it works perfectly fine. No problems here!
The Verizon guy who came to my apartment to install internet and phone system messed up my ceiling and drilled three holes (3rd one being the best, according to him) up my ceiling. Then, he gave me instructions that only him would understand. He says, if I have questions, either call their 800 number or consult the instruction manuals. Charming guy! I want my $10 tip back!