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Verizon, Fiber Or Die?
dynamator writes "I live about 550 meters from my Verizon central office. I pay for their higher-tier 'Power Plan' DSL service, which boasts 3 Mbps down and 758 Kbsp up. For the past year, I've enjoyed excellent performance on this line. However, this past month Verizon has been hooking up my neighbors with FiOS, their new fiber-to-the-home system, and guess what, my connection speed and dependability have taken a nosedive. What can I do to build the case that this is really happening? Will anyone, least of all Verizon, care? Are they making me a fiber offer I can't refuse?" We discussed a few times last year what Verizon may be up to.
I'd LOVE to have FIOS, but no... DSL is the only choice. Take it and love it.
I don't know what your relationship is with your neighbors, so this may not be plausible:
Could you see if you can use a program like Netcat to stream a large amount of data from your system to theirs, and see what kind of throughput you get? If Verizon is really not giving you the bandwidth you're paying for, this may be one way to prove it.
There are some kinds of connection shaping that this test won't detect, but at least it's a start.
I'd cancel my Verizon DSL and just connect to the neighbor's wireless.
I worked for Verizon as a level 2 tech in their call center located in Columbus, Ohio for 2 years. They will not care you can keep complaining and complaining and nothing will ever happen, mainly because no one really gives a shit about the customers and all they care about is how fast you can finish a call.
I know it really depends on the area what kind of service you get, but it might not hurt to just, you know, call them and ask them to send a tech to check the line. My wife and I bought a house last year and we had to downgrade from FIOS (tell me again why you won't upgrade?) back to DSL. When we first moved in we had some issues with the service dropping fairly frequently. After a couple service calls they eventually sent out an actual line tech who looked at the line and found there was a minor fault, which he fixed. Since then everything's been flawless. Maybe it really is just a coincidence, and if you can get someone to come take a look at your line you might get somewhere. Or, you could just post bitchy complaints on Slashdot and hope the CmdrTaco Fairy will come fix your line. Either way, can't hurt to try, right?
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Seriously, you have the option of FiOS and you're complaining about your non-FiOS connection? Upgrade, and consider yourself lucky that you have the opportunity to do so!
How we know is more important than what we know.
AT&T is kind of doing the same thing with their Uverse service. Worst service ever. They had shoddy installation, and you can't have DSL AND Uverse coming in the same residence even though they are on different phone lines.
Supposedly it is blazing fast, but AT&T doesn't offer static IP addresses on Uverse......oh well........
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
You can certainly test it using a site like speakeasy, and make a case - maybe not one that will stand up in court, but one that would convince anyone who had an open mind.
That begs the question, will they care? You can only find out if you try, and if they are unresponsive, my next stop would be the Attorney General's aconsumer protection division. In my experience, the office in my state appreciates learning about technology, as they don't have the internal budget to keep up with everything themselves.
If the AG isn't interested, then you really are out of luck, unless you want to mount a crusade, and even that is a long shot. But I would give the AG a try, after you have gathered a lot of evidence via speakeasy, etc.
Then post your stats. For example, if your modem does give them to you, get the tech to read off the following to you:
- Line profile name (this should include what type of profile you are on, ie: interleave or fastpath, or al2 vs. al1, if you were up here)
- Sync Speed (Kbs) up and down
- Relative Capacity Occupation (%)
- Noise Margin (0..31 dB)
- Signal Power (0..20 dBm)
- Attenuation (0..60 dB)
Yes, to the ones who have done this thankless job, you can now guess what area of the world I work in and what I do now. Woohoo.
If your RCO is maxxed and you are syncing at less than the profile, your modem is syncing too high and this will cause dropouts. Your profile must be lowered, the line improved, or modem replaced. If the noise margin is under 6 dB (it's nicer if it's above 10 dB, honestly), again, you will have dropouts. Improve the lines or replace the modem. Signal power, don't worry about it too much, although both sides should be somewhat similar, it shouldn't be a big deal. Attenuation you want as low as possible, generally on a clean line, this will indicate your distance from the SLAM, and therefore the maximum speed. If you were capped at 3 mbits, you probably have an attenuation of over 35 db, which means 3+ km from the SLAM. Anything over 56 dB means you're screwed, and you're probably 5+ km from the SLAM. You could try to get the tech to send someone out to hook you up to another remote, if it exists. Good luck with that.
If you're already on interleave, you've probably got interference issues or a bad line, but nobody will care. If you're not on interleave and don't care about gaming, tell the tech to put you on interleave and say bye-bye to the problems.
Yay. That was fun. Next call please!
See, it's like you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a very long straw called FiOS that reaches all the way over into your milkshake. I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE! I drink it up.
Surely there are other comparable ISPs out there, if you think they are pulling something then take your business elsewhere. If you live in an area built up enough to get FiOS, there should be many better ones to chose from. Personally, I have found the smaller DSL providers to be better and cheaper then the one that owns the lines here.
Verizon is using some pretty tricky things to sign people onto FIOS. And I as a dedicated Verizon hater do my best to counter it.
Example, I've pushed a half dozen people away from Verizon when I explained that their costs for the same service would actually RISE if they switched away from Cox.
In one case the sales droid for Verizon told one former co-worker of mine that Verizon owned all the coax cable that Cox used. That's complete and utter bullshit. Cox owns all the coax.
You know I read all of these comments about how people would kill for FIOS. And I've also heard bad things about comcast, but I'm here to tell you, Verizon's customer service and billing is THE WORST! I ordered fios a year ago, got it put in and all was well. Then I move to a new home where fios is also available. They charge me a $90 "installation charge" that 3 reps insist is right, but the 4th rep says is wrong and that it should be $30. They screwed the activation so I called to get the order number to do it online and the rep sent me a new router and added a $140 charge. So they autobilled my credit card something like $280 this month... FOR FIOS INTERNET ONLY! Both verizon tech support and billing were supposed to send me a return label to return the new router and NEITHER SUCCEEDED! They are AMAZINGLY incompetent. They will transfer you around time after time to the wrong department. They don't listen to a word you say. The hold times are better now, a month ago I was holding over an hour to get through to anyone. For what it's worth the installation was top notch at both homes as has been the service. Just hope you never need to call them for anything... ever. You'll be sorry.
...because in Boston, which just so happens to be the silicon valley of the east coast (and has been for decades), I can't get FiOS.
Why? Verizon is holding the entire city hostage and refusing to do a fucking thing until they get a state-wide cable TV franchise license so they don't have to play on the same field as the cable operators (who have always had to negotiate per-town.) Look at the verizon deployment maps; it's a sea of blue and green, except for a giant void near Boston.
They've fed all sorts of bullshit to people; at one point, they were claiming that they were not doing "metropolitan areas." Funny: I guess New York City and DC aren't metropolitan areas? Everyone in the burbs and even the boondocks in eastern MA gets FiOS, but no, not Boston...
Please help metamoderate.
this is what happens when you employ policies that virtually eliminate market competition in favor of granting 'sweetheart deals' in return for the ability to snoop the network whenever you please. Telco is perhaps the most corrupt it has ever been in American history. Joshua Zeidner
It's possible that if this all started while, or just after, they got done digging up the neighborhood to run the fiber, that they accidentally did something that is causing line interference or an impedance of some sort. In this case, a line technician would be able to determine an actual physical problem with any of the lines. Obviously, a phone call to have them check won't hurt.
Cheers! - Steve from MyBrotherSteve.com
If you got a Cable Co. in your area. Jump to it.
Most likely if FIOS is around, the local Cable Co. is probably price matching Verizon's FIOS Service. Possibly beating Verizon's price. Although be warned. Depending on the Cable Co, it could be worse service than what Verizon is giving you.
Verizon's tech service has been going downhill for awile. My first experience with it was they couldn't hook up a friends house for some reason because he's close to a state border. After dicking with Verizon for two months of appointment cancellations and broken activation promises he called the Cable Co. (in this case, Adelphia) and had Broadband in his house in three days. Then when he canceled the DSL service he never received, they charged him for two months of service and a breach of contract for service he never received.
Another example is two weeks ago I was working on a PC who already had Verizon. He was on the basic plan and I recommended that he upgrade to the power plan. He called them and asked for the upgrade from basic to power and they said it would take a few days (Vs Time Warner's and Armstrong's "call to upgrade and get the speed instantly" support) A few days later, he gets an e-mail that welcomes him to Verizon and happily tells him that he's now paying the power plan price for basic tier service. In other words. Verizon happily raised his bill $10 a month for the exact same level of DSL service he was already receiving. Thankfully he got that strengthened out after talking to a billing rep during his work hour since billing closes at 5PM and tech support had no clue what was going on.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
A couple years ago when we moved into our current house we signed up for DSL. Things were good for a couple months, then connectivity became very poor and spotty. Throughput was bad, and the line would completely drop from time to time. We had 6 different tech guys come to our house. Each would hook up his diagnostic machine, which would sync up with the office and show really good connectivity and throughput. They swapped out our modem at least 4 times. They said that since the meter showed the line was good, the problem was mine. One guy started screwing around with my computers before I finally told him to stop (throughput was fine on my LAN). Finally, this one guy came out, and he was determined to get to the bottom of it. He at least had the intelligence to say that just because his equipment told him everything was fine, the fact that a modem couldn't sync meant otherwise. He ran a new line from the pole to the house. Then he helped run a new line all the way to my office (even though they're supposed to charge for that). He had a guy at the office switch the node we physically connected into. Still bad connectivity. So he then went from pole to pole from my house to the office, which is at least a dozen blocks. He finally found a splice that was connected with old-style crimp on connectors. Apparently there was some corrosion in them, which increased the resistance just exactly enough that the modem couldn't tolerate it, but the diagnostic equipment could (and the resistance was within tolerable limits). He replaced the splice, and everything has been perfect for well over a year. He gave me his own cell number and told me to call him direct if we ever had further problems.
So my point is not to jump to conclusions. There could be a physical problem with your line that happened about when the FiOS was rolling out. Try hooking your modem directly to your Network Interface Box (usually on the side of the house) with all of your interior wiring disconnected (should just be a little jumper going into a regular phone jack - unplug it and plug your modem straight in). If your throughput goes up, you have a problem with your interior wiring. If it doesn't, the DSL provider is obligated to fix the problem. Make sure you tell them that you hooked your modem up directly to the network interface box, because the tech person should then immediately schedule someone to come out instead of having you try bridging your DSL modem and a bunch of other worthless garbage. They will still probably tell you to hard-reset your modem, but after that then they should send someone out. As in my case, it might take several different techs to find someone that can actually help. Same with support on the phone. Some people would randomly pick things out of some list a computer showed them, and ask me to follow various worthless steps. Other people knew exactly what was not wrong, based on what I told them up front, and so they didn't beat around the bush.
Better known as 318230.
Verizon reps have told me numerous times that they want to phase out DSL in favor of FIOS whenever possible, because the costs to maintain a fiber connection are less than DSL. It's not really surprising that they want to push a service that provides a lot more revenue, and has a lower cost overall. Even if it takes pulling customers kicking and screaming
I work for a smallish Canadian telco. We offer DSL, IPTV, and telephone all over copper. Our infrastructure is all FTTN, and you can pull 10mbps at 600m easy. If you're on our service, 20mbps is possible if you have HDTV. There's one of two things going on here. Verizon is trying to screw you, or there's something wrong with your line.
If it's the former Verizon won't help you. If it's the latter, a tech should be able to fix it. If you're only 550m from the CO you might not have an access cabinet in between you and the CO, but there should be many pairs into the pedestal near your house. A tech should be able to just do a pair change and fix it. The other thing that could happen is a port change in the CO. Both of these are quick, as long as the CO is manned. We have about 25 in this city, and only 1 is manned full time.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
$50/month here in Japan gets me 100Mbps (up and down) FTTH with no caps in place. Yes, you can all say "well Japan is such a small and densely populated country so of course they can all be wired up like that", which I hear so often. Well, why can't the US do this for their main cities as they are all densely populated. If they were to take this approach and then build high bandwidth links interconnecting these cities it could be done.
But the real problem here is that the telecoms and politicians are too busy filling their pockets and planning how to spy on you to care about doing anything to improve their networks.
I'd most likely suspect that it's simply a case of they have only a fixed amount of backbone bandwidth to their central office that's now feeding both the old DSL and new fiber customers, and now all those newly added fiber customers are simply sucking the life out of the backbone connection's bandwidth capacity.
That appears what Verizon wants you to do, rather than have to maintain that crappy old copper network. That crappy old regulated copper network.
As I understand it, Verizon (and others) lobbied and won concessions in the regulation of newer technology networks. If you request new service, supplied by FiOS, they can get you to agree to new terms of service. Terms of service much more to Verizon's liking, no doubt.
Verizon could work their way down the street and switch everyone to a FiOS line, even if only to provide POTS at a fiber to copper interface at the demarcation point. It would be cheaper for them in the long run, not having to maintain two systems along your street. But if they did so on their own initiative, you could expect to receive service under your old TOS and associated regulations.
Things on the copper network will get worse and worse, until you beg to sign away your first born for fiber.
Have gnu, will travel.
I have Optimum Online from Cablevision. I've been salivating at the prospect of FIOS to enter the picture locally and eat Cablevision's lunch, out of spite as much as for any technical/cost reason. But no. Cablevision has a deal in place with the apartment management company in my complex that prevents FIOS from coming in. We (the tenants) think that should be illegal (and maybe it is), but good luck getting anyone to look into it. Meanwhile, Cablevision happily strings one of their main coax cables through an open basement window, snakes it up through some tree branches and over the roof of a nearby building. All because the apartment complex carelessly cut an underground cable several years ago installing a sprinkler system and refused to take responsibility.
Bottom line: I am not one of the new FIOS customers in your area chewing on the bandwidth.
i'm switching back to COX cable in a few months once my contract is up. fios is laggy, flaky at night and worst of all the speed varies through out the day
bored? try this http://jadmadi.net/blog/2005/01/27/linux-wine-how-to-running-windows-viruses-with-wine/
Uh, yeah. No duh?
I would have enjoyed Slashdot at 13.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Yes, I was a manager at the fisher's center. I used to take negative escalations all the time for this. In short, we can't do anything for you besides schedule a tech between 8-5, M-F. Oh you can't take time off work? Guess we can never get it fixed then! Oh, you took time off work to be there but the technician didn't show? Better take another day! Ridiculous...
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
I'm positive he meant "Cowboy Neal to the home".
Oh, it's not a survey!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Take the FiOS. It's better in every way. Cheaper, faster, more reliable.
The conspiracy theories that they're trying to pull the copper to make it so you can't go with the competition have been soundly debunked. Why on earth would you want to stay with crappy old DSL when you could have rock-stable FiOS?
For some perspective, my internet uptime with FiOS is going on three years. Your DSL can't do that.
I seriously doubt that your neighbors or even quadrant of the city are cutting into fiber optic bandwidth. OC-192 runs on fibre as do many other extremely high speed networks. 3 Mbps is nothing to fiber. Even 3 Gbps shouldn't be a problem. If it is, then somebody is running low bandwidth gear on a high-speed piece of glass.
I would suspect the issue is like comcast here. They reduced everybody's 6 Mbps cable feeds to 1 Mbps because, as one tech told me, "nobody ever checks their speeds anyway." Another tech said they were reducing the bandwidth for Internet to make room for some other digital services including high-def TV, IP telephony and more. I dropped comtrash for DSL and have been quite happy.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
One little know fact is that your local telephone company (Verizon) typically must follow rules imposed by both the FCC and your States 'Public Utilities Commission' (PUC). Depending where you live, there is sometimes even a local PUC.
You can complain to both the FCC and PUC(s) about your service.
While it may not be enough to improve your service right away, the telephone company MUST pay attention these complaints.
Speakeasy.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
See, what we did here is hand over a bunch of tax dollars to the telcos when they promised to build all these fat pipes in the early 90s. Then they didn't build the fat pipes. Gotta get that whole don't-pay-for-a-product-that-don't-exist-yet thing right next time.
In my experience, the people who do sales and provisioning at Verizon are completely incompetent idiots. I had static IP addresses, and needed some more. It took six weeks of daily calls before they finally provisioned it, including lying about escalating it multiple times. Almost the same thing with acquiring UseNet access. And about half a dozen other things. Idiots.
On the other hand, if you can actually talk to a tech guy in person, they are fantastic. They will do whatever it takes to fix whatever it is, no matter what it costs or how long it takes. They put a new DSLAM in the central office because I started getting intermittent connections on the DSL line. If you ever talk to a tech guy, make sure you get his phone number, and never lose it. If you have to call back to the general number, you will wind up with the idiots again.
I now use another ISP for my DSL over Verizon's wire. The one thing I dread about switching to FIOS is not being able to use my ISP and having to deal with Verizon sales and provisioning again.
I don't think that they are making him an offer he can't refuse.....
I think they are making him an offer he won't have a choice to refuse.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
The regulatory agencies will just twiddle their thumbs unless you call them. And when you do, they will be happy to pounce.
Thanks for reminding us about a very useful resource.
Don't forget to check out www.speedmatters,org, too. They've surveyed the competition in the global marketplace and their surveys clearly show how American ISPs have mangled the market.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Check out the links on the bottom of the original article "be up to". I'm just amazed at what Verizon will do to prevent competition. Cutting the copper cable to prevent competition is just "beat the competition at any cost". That's the mantra here in America. I wonder if they do it so blatantly in other countries.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
I'm sorry, sir, we no longer offer the Pinto. You'll have to get this Escort.
The great news is the new ones don't explode.
The bad news is porch lights will flash as you drive down the street because everyone will think you're the pizza guy and missed their house.
(nb.: that last one is from some comedian, I don't remember who. Please don't sue me.)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I get real tired of people getting up with this national pride over Internet. So you got cheap Internet? Ok, great. How much does your apartment cost? How large is it? My condo is 167 square meters (1800 square feet). It has a nice courtyard with a pool, a large parking lot and so on. I own it, I don't rent, the mortgage is about 78,000 JPY (760 USD) including all taxes and such. So how's that stack up to your place?
Now I'm not trying to brag here, I am making a point that different countries are, well, different. Even different areas of the same country are different. So it is great that you can get cheap Internet access, but have you considered everything involved in that? Have you considered that your situation might not be the same as everyone else's? Is it even the same in all of Japan? Can you get that same access in, say Tono (which despite being rural for Japan is larger than many US towns)?
Another part to consider is are they really giving you 100mbit Internet, or are they giving you a 100mbit connection to a WAN that is connected to the Internet? What I mean is generally speaking in the US, when you buy a connection you get the given bandwidth to anywhere. Your connection to your neighbour is no faster or slower than to anywhere else. The ISP has sufficient upstream to support that to their backbones and so on. So with my 10mbit link, I find that I get that to pretty much anywhere that also has sufficient bandwidth. It isn't just things on my network, it is anywhere on the Internet.
Well in informal testing, I've found that isn't always true with foreign ISPs. I remember several years ago when I worked for network operations on campus, I was testing with someone in Sweden, they were on a DSL service called BBB. 10mbit to the home, which at the time was pretty high end. However, they got crap connections to us, about 256kbit. Well, the problem wasn't on our end. I checked the routers, they were all fine, I checked the links, they were all low usage (below 20%), I tried transfers to a number of known high bandwidth sites in various places, all went fast.
A little playing around revealed that more or less BBB was a huge WAN, like we had on campus. They provided a high speed connection between you and them. So anyone else on the same ISP you got blazing fast speeds to. However they didn't have the bandwidth to support it to the rest of the Internet. So if you hopped off their network, things got much, MUCH slower.
So is your situation similar? It wouldn't surprise me if it was, because larger links cost lots and lots of money. It isn't a linear scale. While 100mbit gear is pretty cheap, if you have a bunch of people on 100mbit, you can't have a 100mbit uplink. If you do, that means that they'll only get their full rate if they are the only on using it. That don't mean you need dedicated bandwidth per person, but you do need more than what they each get. So while 100 people x 100mbit doesn't need a 10gbit uplink, you probably should have a 1gbit uplink, maybe more. Well the same thing is true at higher levels, and it starts to add up pretty quick to needing some real big links, if you are actually offering people that speed to the Internet.
Otherwise, you have a situation like we do on campus. I have a gig connection to my desktop at work. The switch it is connected to has a gig to our firewall, that has redundant gig to the building switch, which has redundant gig to the distribution switch, which has redundant gig to the core, which has redundant gig to the edge. However I wouldn't say I have a gig net connection. Why? Well two things:
1) At each of those levels, the connection is only a gig, but I am sharing with more people. Our building probably has 500 computers in it, the distribution switches it connects to probably handle 50 buildings, and the whole campus connects to the core switches. So while I could get a gig all the way to the core, I could only do it if I were the only one using it. In reality, I have to share with lots of other people.
2) We d
I had a wireless modem from verizon. I lost it because I stayed at a guys house (payed rent and all) and had to use it to connect to the Internet for my own use. I tired to get it when I left, but he was unable to get a modem he bought to connect. Verizon told him it wasn't certified by the, and he had to pay $200 to buy one from them that may or may not work. 6 months later I still don't have my modem, because after 10 hours on the phone I refuse to deal with his problem, he won't give me the modem, and I now use wired anyway. I could argue, but thought of it makes me want to puke. Verizon sucks big chocolaty balls. Go Chef!!
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
I suffer with a dial-up connection at home.
Paying my Verizon phone bill on line is the most excruciating web experience I ever have. A click-through-a-handful-of-https-pages takes about 15 minutes. I typically play a couple of games of Solitaire while waiting for each subsequent page to load. I have assumed from Day 1 that they are trying to make it as painful as possible, so as to compel me to buy DSL from them.
Actually, I would if it were available in my neighborhood. DSL is not available in my immediate area, but they punish me once a month anyway.
Do you have it in your contract? If not, they don't care.
"up to xxx mps doesn't count )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Very funny. I was in line first. Been there for 10 years.
Congratulations on your DSL. They won't even sell me DSL, and fibre to the curb is out of the question since it is 15 miles to the nearest curb.
Verizon doesn't care, and the won't. When our dialup went from steady-for-hours to a few minutes at best, it took us all kinds of hell raising over a number of days to get them to fix it. Now we are back to 24K dialup. Forget 33.6, and forget any notion of 53K.
Well, not quite. Yesterday I put up a skyway dish. Happy to say we are seeing something like 5x the maximum speed that I can get from my self-proclaimed "broadband and entertainment company," a company of liars.
I have been waiting for years to get Verizon Internet. 2 years ago, when the whole thing started, my aunt, who lives down the street from me, was telling me how good Verizon is and how it's about the same price as dial-up during their introductory period. So I called up the Verizon office and asked if I could get it. They said no, and gave me a strange reason. So I called again a month later, and they gave me a different reason. Finally, I talked to some people, and it seems my aunt lives close enough to Verizon, but my house, just a few houses away, is "too far away" from the Verizon central offices.
I waited 6 months and called again. Nope! They told me they expect us to be ready to hook up in about 3-6 months, and we shuold get Comcast while we wait (that's right, the Verizon people recommended Comcast, a competitor, while we wait), so we got Comcast. It has been 20 months since that, STILL NO VERIZON INTERNET!
I have lost hope, and am not even bothering asking anymore. Any ISP that has the nerve to SEND ME ADS FOR THEIR INTERNET IN THE MAIL even though I can't even get the damn service is not worth paying. (I called them and asked if they could stop sending me ads, I still get them. They got sneaky and put FiOS ads on the back of my phone bills).
Switch to FIOS!
When I was visiting home over the holidays, a Verizon rep who was going door-to-door stopped by my parents' house. My mom ran the math on what he was saying, and decided to listen because it turned out to be cheaper than the 56k dialup the family had originally had. Speed, they didn't think they cared about: They made this decision strictly on cost.
You see, originally, they'd been paying for,
- AT&T by-the-minute long distance
- Plain ol' Verizon local service
- Comcast cable TV
- MSN dialup.
By scrapping all of these and switching to FIOS phone+TV+long-distance, they got,Seriously: You'll be getting cheaper, faster, more reliable service. I don't see why you wouldn't want to switch. People all over Slashdot complain, "why don't we get fiber to the home in the US?" Well, here's your chance to get it!
Not only does FIOS have good throughput (like cable); it has good latency (like DSL): IIRC, I get single-digit pings in Quake when I'm home. And whereas my friends' Comcast cable connections seem to die periodically, I think FIOS has been down maybe once in the year that my parents have had it.
(It's possible that my parents had a particularly good experience; I understand that people in another part of town had had issues with FIOS (relating to an inept tech?). When we got it FIOS was bleeding-edge and the guy who came freely admitted that Verizon was having a hard time keeping up with training. But I'd suspect that the installers probably have the experience by now to do the job right.)
My parents' only complaint? They now need a "cable box" on their TV, and this confuses them (a fact which confuses me, since they're otherwise smart people. Must be age). Moral of the story: If cable boxes don't confuse you, FIOS wins on all counts :-); it's better service, cheaper.
That speakeasy?
Fuck them. They are worse fucking liars than any other ISP I've had.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
How about 17mbps down and 1.5mbps up, is that anything to brag about? I pay only 44.95 a month for that and its through RoadRunner/TW, and guess what, unlike the FIOS customers i know i don't get random disconnects every 5 minutes, the FIOS infrastructure fails, look into it, daisy chained points of failure all over.
Verizon needs to hire an engineer.
As far as I'm concerned Verizon has bigger things to work out besides DSL and FiOS internet, switch to a different provider.
And as far as what TFA says:
What can I do to build the case that this is really happening? Will anyone, least of all Verizon, care? Are they making me a fiber offer I can't refuse?
Nothing, No, Pretty much.
Verizon fails at internet.
Also theres basically no reason for the speeds FiOS has, any normal house cant possibly use those, even a five person family where everyone has a PC, you cannot eat that much bandwidth. I havn't found 2 sites so far where i could download at my max speed, and that was the Windows Server 2008 Trial ISO from Microsoft, and one of those free MMORPGs(which i never bothered to install come to think of it). Ive got 3 power users, we torrent and browse all day every day, NEVER have i had any slow down at all, and noone has yet managed to eat the entirety of the bandwidth.
I had a short job with them but lost it as I had a few elderly calls that blew my handle time over.
Everywhere there were posters of ideal employees who kept their handle time low. Even in the men's urinal on the wall "Mike typically has a handle time of 4-6 minutes bla bla bla whats your excuse"?
One woman was a total b*tch as a supervisor but it was ok to be rude to other employees. Her handle time was 5 minutes your 8 so you suck.
Anyway my point is call centers are viewed as cost centers and an added cost. Meanwhile AOL lost all their customers due to very poor support and many techs who are successful are there because they are rude and dont give a shit about you or their other customers.
I was a nice guy and tried to help. Helping is bad and incompetent because I cost the company money.
No wonder these jobs are going to India. WHo would want to work in that?
http://saveie6.com/
Well, if Verizon managed to suck or wrangle from Cox all the cabling and bits in the pipes, would that make Verizon the Master Cox Sucker? How much latency improvement would be involved?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I recently was the lead on a migration project from a parital T3 to Verizon Business DSL to Verizon Business IDA Circuit.
The trouble, pain, sleeplessness, agony, downtime, and lastly extreme frustration i went through could easily fill a book. I simply don't have the patience to relay the entire story to you; i'll focus on the more shocking attributes.
1.After explaining our entire migration path (which involved the DSL ciruit, our emergency backup, only because Their promised IDA Install and router ship date were off by 2 months) we were told it would be no problem to have the 3/768 service with an additional 26 ip addresses.
2.They gave us 13 instead of 26, we worked for 2 days straight to *make* our 50 site server configuration work with 13 ip's while they spent 2 weeks attempting to resolve why we were assigned 26 ip's but only able to use 13.
3.They turned off our production internet connection 5 times for between 30min and 5 hours trying to debug this issue, ignoring comments in our account notes like CALL US IF ANY DOWNTIME IS REQUIRED TO RESOLVE THIS ISSUE.
4.They remove our 13 ip address configuration, and assigned a block of 26 new ones, IGNORING comments on our account like "CALL US BEFORE THE CONNECTION IS TAKEN DOWN FOR ANY PURPOSE, OR IF EVEN 1 IP ADDRESS NEEDS TO CHANGE FOR ANY REASON. (this obvisouly became a DNS nightmare. with 50 domains, and several thousand hosts...our customer ended up calling in on 3 seperate occasions to let us know that our corporate site was down, as well as the 10k+ replicating websites...)
5.They cheerfully responed to my plea of "we're loosing 25k a day while you're making these changes, PLEASE just leave it with the 13 ip address, and we'll make it work until our other connection is turned on" with "i understand that you're concerned with losing your internet connection, and that your losing money while we're resolving this issues. Please be patient and we'll have it resolved shortly" which after 2 hours of no connection, no explanation, and no ability to speak to anyone past the "supervisor department" was less than helpful, even in a pseudo-apathetic sense.
6.The IDA-Circuit (i.e. frame relay) connect people were formerly MCI and liked pointing that out at every opportunity, were less helpful than the Business DSL people. If you thought paying an extra 400/month for Business-Class DSL gave you some kinda prioirity, or realistic expectation of CSR's being able to say something like "it won't go down, and if it needs too we'll call to schedule a good time" you will find that you are as wrong as i was to believe that they can actually do that.
7.They do not care, not even in a pretend sense, not even when they're legally liable for loss of business, not even if your legal department calls them. They don't care.
8.I suggest getting cable; All those fios ppl are most likely jumping on the fios cable service too. Your node traffic is probably dropping substantially.
9.Fios is usually cheaper than a DSL connect, or a DSL dry loop. Why not just join them?
Have the cell carriers resolved their bickering over standards? Is it still an issue using one carrier phone and trying to reach a friend on another carrier's phone? Also, isn't a LOT of that speed improvement due to repeaters on tall buildings? I did see a helluva lot of digging in the streets, done by TEPCO, and some for the new lines being built to squeeze between existing rights of ways, so maybe a lot of your and other's speed gains are due to fast, fat pipes underground. (Those were the negative questions.)
Nowadays, is ISDN still available in the phone booths? I saw some there in 2004 and found it interesting (i was partly laughing, but then thought there must be valid reason, and then i recalled that in the US it might be impossible to find wired laptop connections just anywhere on the street -- even if for a fee) that ISDN modems/connections could be had. Never tried one, nor looked at the pricing. Saw them in Shinjuku, near JR West station. But, others were around, to, I think near Ginza District.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
When I lived in RI, Verizon bent over backwards to make my DSL work properly. First a technician spent half a day in a bucket truck removing bridged tap. Then another tech. installed an outside POTS/DSL splitter. Then they sent me a different DSL modem. After all this they did get my over 16,000 foot DSL circuit working well at 1500/384. After a month the speed nosedived and my phone got noisy. They fixed both in less than a day. The irony was that they told me if I had lived 1/2 a mile further away from the CO, I could have had 3000/768 speeds via a remote terminal.
Here in Hollywood, I have AT&T for my ILEC. :( I also have DSL here. There are two drops to my apartment from the C.O. (the former tenent had two phones). One measures 5300 feet, the other over 10,000 feet. Guess which one they put my phone and DSL on? You guessed it, the 10,000+ foot one! As a result the fastest DSL speed I can get is 3000/512, when the other line qualifies for 6000/768! Will AT&T Help me one bit? NOOOO! It would take them about five minutes to move everything over to the 'better' line (completely in software-no hardware work needed), yet they simply refuse.
Verizon = GOOD! AT&T = BADDDDD!
interesting... when 'hughesnet' was part of directv originally the upload was done over dialup, is this 'new' satellite company using some sort of method to use both dial up and satellite? bigger dish, too, so it should offer more stable internet than the 'other' satellite providers. hugesnet with the fap is the worst, no clue about the one that targets gas stations etc, and the other satellite company has a 30 day roll-over fap, which is better if you say, only download linux and patches, worse if you have kids who like you tube..
considering how expensive hugesnet is their fap is ridiculous, they're printing money on the people who sign with them.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I've heard the same stories from some friends at work that are having FiOS lines being buried in their neighborhood now. One of them even had a neighbor with a water supply line damaged by the digging. We didn't have that sort of problem when the lines went in here, but we're an old neighborhood, and everything is on poles (no digging required). It's more likely that someone damaged the old lines, rather than sabotaged them. At least I can confirm no problems with my VZ DSL when FiOS went in here. I didn't switch over until they started offering TV service here too (> 1 year, at least), and for that time, my service was not noticeably impacted in any way.
Boston is being held hostage? At least that means you're wanted. Northern New England is just being abandoned by Verizon.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
http://www.google.com/search?q=fios+ONT+battery
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Unfortunately, the posting has very little detail regarding the type of service degradation the poster is experiencing. On my Verizon DSL (3Mbit down/768kbit up) I have noticed over the last couple of months stretches of packet loss to my next hop and my local Verizon core routers in the area. Typically somewhere in the range of up to 5% for a couple of hours. Many times these start at midnight (relative to my timezone) and last until the morning - probably some kind of maintenance. But many times this happens during the day as well. This is when it really sucks because I use VoIP via VPN for office communication. The call center people are useless. They run a local loop test and tell me everything is OK, then they ask me to reboot my DSL modem and router which is useless (I use an OpenBSD PC as router). It is impossible to get to someone with some technical knowledge who doesn't read from a script. I highly recommend SmokePing for capturing data about the DSL connection quality over long periods of time.
ah, pr1me...my 1st experience w/modern configuration-managed o/s...we were totally blown away that our code would still run after an upgrade...2 bad they didn't survive:-(
They charged me 3 times in a month for each of my 3 phones, then disconnected me for being late when I contested the multiple charges - and billed me 3 times for the 3 early disconnects. 2 years on they still call occasionally & tell me I owe on the 2nd & 3rd billings.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/03/08/2119211.shtml
My penis is large and I have fuel injection.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Hi, I live in Somerville, and have been around Boston for a long time so i have a bit of credibility in stating that DEC was hugE in the 80s, only to get really beaten by Sun and Microsoft in the 90s. They made rock solid and expensive equipment. A Microvax was sort of like a 1985 Mercedes - and almost as expensive.
Anyhow, this city has spawned some of the most significant scientific and technological revolutions, and some of the largest companies. But they all move on. Why? Well, part of it is taxes, but part of it also has to do with the cost of real estate. Some of this is caused by corruption, but there are other factors at work as well. Simply put: the land here is too hard to build on, because it's mostly filled in swamp. That's why The Big Dig was/is such a disaster. It gets better out in the suburbs, but that's a different story.
Biotech is the Next Big Thing, or so at least MIT thinks. That's the way Cambridge is going lately. I think biotech may have been oversold, but who listens to me?
I can see why people find jobs in other places, and move away. I like Seattle, and might move there some day. But there's something special to Boston that I'd miss.
Dude -- I was born in Somerville hospital.
I agree, DEC was huge; but it wasn't the beginning.
Personally, I think Biotech will be huge. But I think the same thing will happen with it here as with computers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.