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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 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.
...but AT&T doesn't offer static IP addresses on Uverse...Ever heard of Dynamic DNS?
I use FreeDNS and find it be reliable and easy to use. Disclaimer: I have no financial or other interest in the site except that I find it useful.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Actually Verizon has a slow throughput hotspot team, that continues to monitor the DSL equipment for slow throughput issues due to congestion, and see what areas need upgraded equipment.
Frontline phone techs are not made aware of these issues, however if you call and make a ticket for slow throughput (and the agents do thier job properly), if others in your area are having similar problems is will be picked up and noticed (if you call in and report it)
P.S. guy from Columbus say hi to JA for me.
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.
Check your DSL TOS; Verizon has the option to force you over to FIOS in areas where they offer it. You'll probably have to switch sooner or later.
I'm in the silicon valley of, well, the valley (ie, the real deal, mtn view/sunnyvale/san jose).
and no, we don't get FIOS either.
technology center of the US and we can't get fiber.
I see many roads are torn apart. not sure what they are digging up and doing but they are NOT planting fiber, that much is clear.
(at least not consumer or customer fiber. maybe they think terr-a-wrists are underground so they keep digging up our streets...)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Most ISPs have been moving over to dynamic IPs for the last decade or so. Well, the larger ones at least. When we first got a cable modem, back when cable modems didn't suck hard, we had assigned IPs and could count on having one per computer. A few years later without any particular warning, the cable operator switched over to dynamic ones. I finally had to call to find out why it was that I couldn't get one of the computers online, turned out that the IP had been reassigned without them telling me.
I'm not sure how the smaller ISPs are, but most of the time the big guys want to make people pay for the staticness if it is available at all.
$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.
Ha! I live in Sunnyvale and I have FIBER. I get 20480kbp and I am not on Comcast or AT&T. Paxio.com
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.
For those who only can get DSL, the best way to document what is happening with your connection is if you run FireFox get the extension written by Google called Load Time Analyzer https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3371. They may offer something similar for IE. It will fully document down to the millisecond what is happening as you load web pages and even graph the data for you to present to tech support on your performance issues.
I had some issues with Verizon, and after months of tech support Hell, I found out the only sure-fire way to get things fixed:
File a complaint with the state Public Utilities Commission.
I did it in Illinois where it can be done online. Miraculously within two weeks I had supervisors from falling all over themselves trying to solve my problem, and what had been broken for months got fixed in a matter of days.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Is that really from Google? Funny how it is _not_ listed on the Google Firefox extensions website. http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/
Write the CEO. I had tons and TONS of problems getting AT&T service (both phone and DSL) setup. Executive customer service wasn't very nice and didn't really do anything for me.
So I wrote the CEO.
All of a sudden I had numerous people calling me and doing anything they could to help me.
You can read about my experience here and here. I didn't think it would work, but I was out of options. I'm glad I did it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Not so on August 14, 2003 at about 1605 hrs, I was going to hit the submit button on a slashdot post when the power failed in what is now called The Great Northeast Power Blackout of 2003 and for 3 days the only light in my house was the dial on my telephone drawing it's power from the POTS line and suppling me with dial tone, phone service including to the County emergency dispatch center running on generator back-up who could dispatch Fire, Police and EMS. My Dad has Comcast Digital-Voice The equipment is rated for 8 hours of battery back-up. POTS has to supply 5-9's of uptime, by that standard, Comcast went through one hundred years worth of downtime during yesterday's snowstorm.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds