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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 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.
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.
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
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.
$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.