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Verizon Boosts FiOS Uploads To Match Downloads

Posted by samzenpus on from the greased-lightning dept.

An anonymous reader writes Verizon is boosting the upload speeds of nearly all its FiOS connections to match the download speeds, greatly shortening the time it takes to send videos and back up files online. All new subscribers will get "symmetrical" connections. If you previously were getting 15 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up, you'll be automatically upgraded for no extra cost to 15/15. Same goes if you were on their 50/25 plan: You'll now be upgraded to 50/50. And if you had 75/35? You guessed it: Now it'll be 75 down, and 75 up.

33 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. What about by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    The 150/75 plan? What will my upload speed be???

    1. Re:What about by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Advertised: 150/150
      Actual: 112/112

    2. Re:What about by NatasRevol · · Score: 5, Funny

      Unless you have netflix.

      Then it's the 400k/112MB plan.

      --
      There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
    3. Re:What about by Charliemopps · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This is fiber. I don't have Verizon myself, but in general everything people complain about in regards to ISPs goes away once you're fiber. They'd have to have some pretty serious congestion issues for FiOS to start having trouble.

      Along that same line though, I've no idea why they had asymmetric on fiber to begin with. The point to ADSL (Asymmetric DSL) has to do with crosstalk on the copper lines in the DSLAM. This isn't an issue, at all, for Fiber. So it makes little sense to have asymmetric fiber service other than for marketing purposes.

    4. Re:What about by CreatureComfort · · Score: 4, Informative

      The biggest issue I have with Verizon Fios is the TV service. All of the video channels are so compressed that you inevitably get pixelation and tearing. This is particularly infuriating when it happens during playback for video on demand shows that you are paying extra for.

      And Verizon customer service is a complete joke. They don't even understand that it is their compression causing the problems, and their only solution when you call to complain is to reboot the cable box. After never less than 35 minutes on hold, then 30-50 minutes working with the idiot in Mumbai, then getting "accidentally" disconnected... makes me want to scream.

      But the 75/35 is pretty flash.

      --
      "Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
      Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
    5. Re:What about by ArhcAngel · · Score: 4, Informative

      This is fiber. I don't have Verizon myself, but in general everything people complain about in regards to ISPs goes away once you're fiber. They'd have to have some pretty serious congestion issues for FiOS to start having trouble.

      It matters not how fast your download speed from your ISP is if said ISP's connection to the content you are requesting isn't able to deliver it.

      Along that same line though, I've no idea why they had asymmetric on fiber to begin with. The point to ADSL (Asymmetric DSL) has to do with crosstalk on the copper lines in the DSLAM. This isn't an issue, at all, for Fiber. So it makes little sense to have asymmetric fiber service other than for marketing purposes.

      Consumer ISP's are all about getting content to you. They don't want you throwing up a server at your house to stream data to the ethers. They want you to stream media from them. So much so most have U NO RUN SERVER clauses in their TOS. An asynchronous connection allows them to advertise higher bandwidth "download" speeds and keeps those nasty server runners with paltry pipes to get their filth up to the internet.

      --
      "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
    6. Re:What about by roc97007 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      > The biggest issue I have with Verizon Fios is the TV service. All of the video channels are so compressed that you inevitably get pixelation and tearing. This is particularly infuriating when it happens during playback for video on demand shows that you are paying extra for.

      I think this is pretty much true no matter what the medium. We've noticed high compression rates on satellite (both dish and directv), Comcast (awhile back...) and FIOS. We finally dumped cable entirely. For what network TV my family still watches, we have a big antenna pointing at the TV towers on the ridge over there. The signal is head and shoulders over anything I've seen from cable or dish, with the possible exception of sports on dish (for which additional bandwidth is allowed).

      I guess my learning from all of this is that traditional real time TV, with the possible exception of direct off-air broadcasts, just haven't moved with the times. There are no doubt business reasons for this, but it calls into question, why cable at all? High cost for low quality? Just say no.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    7. Re:What about by Scorchmon · · Score: 2

      My local OTA channels are just as heavily compressed as the cable channels. Local stations are able to fit multiple subchannels into one regular channel, and to accomplish this, they reduce the bandwidth of the main channel. We're left with an overcompressed main channel and two amateur quality subchannels that show local ads and weather which earns the local station some extra income. It's going to get worse with everyone trying to cram more channels into their transmission medium without adding more headroom to compensate, and with so many people that can't even tell the difference between standard definition and high definition channels, the problem's never going to go away.

      Some years ago, I was amazed when I went to a friend's house who had analog cable. This was before digital set top boxes were mandatory, and I was blown away by the quality of his SD channels which lacked any digital compression. Today's compressed HD channels actually look the same if not worse than the SD channels from before digital compression got to where it is today.

    8. Re:What about by KitFox · · Score: 2

      Given that Lvel3 and Verizon are currently holding PR-offs over their peering, this may be related to that. Verizon says "The peering is not symmetrical so L3 should pay us for all the data they are pushing [sic] over our network." L3's response is that Verizon is NOT a symmetrical peer and never can be because their end is full of consumers that pull more data and don't even have upload capability as fast as the download capability.

      Verizon's solution? This change, then say "Look! We're symmetrical! Now pay us to push traffic!"

      --

      @Whee

    9. Re:What about by roc97007 · · Score: 2

      Regarding OTA, one's mileage may vary. I watch very little TV, but as a geek I'm interested a bit in the technical side, and observe that our OTA channels are much sharper than any cable/satellite service we've ever had (and we've had everything that's been available, because wife and daughter are pretty much addicted). But I concede that I've not looked everywhere, and it might be different elsewhere.

      But you bring up a good point. I felt back when HD was being heavily promoted that there was a really good possibility that in practice, regardless of what the standard is actually capable, what we'll actually get won't be more than a slight bump from what we had before.

      I was basing this on the old NTSC days, where the standard was capable of well over 500 horizontal lines, and most people were making do with less than a third of that. (That being the resolution of common time shifting tools of the time.)

      So, yeah, I believe your assessment is correct. You can see it in other media -- there is considerable overlap between exceptionally well authored DVDs, and a poorly authored Blu-Rays, for instance.

      What's the conclusion? Perhaps, that people get the quality they deserve. Or, that they are willing to put up with.

      --
      Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
    10. Re:What about by Rich0 · · Score: 2

      Sounds like there is a simple solution to that for Netflix.

      Have their application send outgoing packets to an IP on their ISP which just get fed to the bit bucket by the border router. So, if you download a movie at 2Mbps, the client sends random data at 4Mbps back. That forces your ISP to upload more than it downloads, and thus they have to negotiate peering.

    11. Re:What about by Bengie · · Score: 2

      A 100mb interface that can get 112mb/s? That's impressive.

  2. Symmetrical? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But they'll throttle my uploads to Netflix, right?

    1. Re:Symmetrical? by MetalliQaZ · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah. Wouldn't be awesome of Netflix enabled a P2P client on the Verizon network? They should do it. The technology exists. It would be glorious.

      --
      "Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
    2. Re:Symmetrical? by laird · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I built that network (Pando Networks) a few years ago. The content companies were generally pretty slow to adopt p2p technology, but game companies are all over it. One pleasant aspect was that the advantage of p2p wasn't just economics, though those were great, it was performance. Because downloading from dozens of sources is much more resilient, and on good networks more performant, than downloading from one source. And, with an intelligent network, it could connect you with peers that are close to you in the network, reducing network congestion at the interconnects by 80%. When we ran a large scale test across all the major ISPs, we in fact saw that p2p clients were able to reduce inter-ISP data exchanges (for the p2p network) by 80%, simply through intelligent peer selection, which ISPs loved, and download performance was better, which downloaders loved.

      And symmetric fiber networks are awesome at p2p.

      --
      Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
  3. Thank Google, not Verizon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They still have a long way to go to catch up to gigabit up/down though.

  4. So who pays who? by alen · · Score: 2

    biggest problem with upload is you send it over free links with Tier 1 networks, or you pay them to take your traffic. with all the user generated stuff now like Twitch, flickr, video calling and other services where you want a fast upload speed that's a lot of data to be paying for.

    with the current L3/Verizon dispute i wonder if they struck a deal where verizon will allow the connections to be upgraded for netflix to work on their network in exchange for L3 taking all their uploaded data for free.

    1. Re:So who pays who? by TemporalBeing · · Score: 3, Interesting

      biggest problem with upload is you send it over free links with Tier 1 networks, or you pay them to take your traffic. with all the user generated stuff now like Twitch, flickr, video calling and other services where you want a fast upload speed that's a lot of data to be paying for.

      with the current L3/Verizon dispute i wonder if they struck a deal where verizon will allow the connections to be upgraded for netflix to work on their network in exchange for L3 taking all their uploaded data for free.

      Hmm...that actually makes for an interesting case.

      So Level3 basically pointed out the issue with User focused ISP's - that they're asymetric and would never provide the ability for those ISPs to compete in the peering arrangements that back-bone providers have. So now if they go to being symetric, it would allow the users to do more and possibly try to combat what the ISP (e.g Verizon) thinks is a fallacy but they can only prove if they make all their links symetric.

      Problem for the ISP is users don't really upload a whole lot any way. So it's not going to change anything for a while. It may get Level3 to drop the "symetric vs asymetric" part of their argument, but it won't change the amount of traffic going from the ISP to back-bone provider.

      What will be telling is if they do the same to the DSL customers in the near future as well. Otherwise they are still primarily an asymetric provider as they have more DSL than FiOS customers.

      Question is: Will Verizon only do this temporarily as part of an argument with Level3? If so, expect a change in the future when their plan doesn't work out. If not, then hopefully other ISPs will follow in order to "compete".

      --
      Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
  5. Consumer plans only? by amaiman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Will this only apply to consumer FiOS plans, or are they rolling this out to Business FiOS, as well?

    1. Re:Consumer plans only? by Raxxon · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's my big question.... I went with a business acct so I could get static IP's instead of playing silly games with dynamic dns hosting crap....

      I'm gonna be so pissed if they say "residential only"...

    2. Re:Consumer plans only? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      See the press release here:
      http://newscenter.verizon.com/corporate/news-articles/2014/07-21-fios-upload-speed-upgrade/

      Short answer: new and existing business customers will be getting it too "later this year".

  6. Re:Advertising by Iconoc · · Score: 2

    And for the record, I noticed I was getting semi-symetrical service close to a year ago.

  7. As a FiOS customer, this would matter to me ... by LordKaT · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a FiOS customer this would matter to me if Verizon wasn't actively trying to extort money from Tier 1 providers.

    1. Re:As a FiOS customer, this would matter to me ... by TubeSteak · · Score: 3, Interesting

      As a not-FiOS customer this would matter to me if Verizon was ever planning to expand their build-out past its current boundaries.

      Verizon CFO Fran Shammo recently [March 2014] told folks at a Deutsche Bank conference on telecom services that âoeI am not going to build beyond the current LSAs (local service acquistions) that we have built out.â

      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
  8. Good for Netflix by colfer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now all Netflix needs to do is get a FiOS account at their house.

  9. Re:aaargh! pinheads in the IT. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    But the corporate official VPN uses some strange protocol. Once the VPN is connected ALL the traffic from the local machine will go the corporate VPN host.

    It's not the VPN protocol, his VPN software changes the default route. He should change it back to the Verizon IP after connecting to the VPN and set an explicit route for the VPN lan (making a script with the settings would be easiest)

  10. People need to read comment threads by CRCulver · · Score: 2

    It's a shame that this "Republican poster" gets so many replies when it is clear even to casual followers of Slashdot that he is a troll who posts the same thing ("Republicans hate X", "Republicans took away Y") in various thread on a daily basis.

    For me, a real sign of the death of Slashdot is the predictability of the trolls. The Republican troll and the Space Nutter troll (who may be one and the same, though I've never counted), offer only this invariable single-issue shtick instead of making things wacky and unpredictable like classic trolls of yore.

  11. Re:aaargh! pinheads in the IT. by jlv · · Score: 2

    All the companies I've worked for didn't allow a split-tunnel VPN from corporate laptops.

    Split-tunnel pretty much kills the whole point of using a VPN.

    That's from the corporate IT point of view.

    From my own machine point of view, having all my traffic routed to my employer kills the whole point of having a fast Internet connection.

  12. What about extending FIOS to us DSL users? by Gothmolly · · Score: 2

    Call me when I can get more than 3 Mbps. Bastards.

    --
    I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
    1. Re:What about extending FIOS to us DSL users? by allquixotic · · Score: 2

      Completely agree. FiOS is 1/8th mile away from my house but they won't bring it the last couple hundred feet. I'd be stuck on ADSL, but I am using 100+ GB/month on my unlimited data, symmetrical 30 Mbps LTE, tethering my 5 GHz 802.11ac smartphone (Galaxy S5) to my 5 GHz 802.11ac wifi adapter on my computer. I uploaded an hour-long HD video to youtube yesterday in about an hour. If Verizon Wireless doesn't want me tying up ~40% of the bandwidth on the local tower, they're more than welcome to ask their non-Wireless brethren to run a fiber cable down the street; I'd be the first to sign up.

      Oh yeah, and in 2007, the Verizon rep who CAME TO OUR DOOR (and repeatedly left fliers on the door handle, and called, and so forth) said that we were "weeks" away from getting FiOS (that is an exact quote -- "weeks"). By my estimation, we're somewhere in the 350-week range from the time when they promised us FiOS, and still no sign of it. Usually when someone says "weeks", a reasonable person would think less than 10. An unreasonable person would think no more than 100. But 350? Yeah. FiOS simply isn't coming here, ever. They've stopped deploying and pocketed the money they received from local and state government to roll it out. I wish I could find a reason to sue them, but I'm pretty happy tightening the screws on them by exploiting my unlimited LTE data plan to the max, which I'm sure hurts them a lot when they multiply my data usage by $10/GB to see how much money they would be making if I were on a limited plan.

      I really dislike Verizon and Verizon Wireless, but I really have no choice right now. And when it comes down to it, symmetrical 30 meg with 60 ms pings isn't that bad on an unlimited data plan. My phone's CPU tends to get a little hotter than its battery would like, which always results in my phones having a significantly degraded battery early on their lifespan, but them's the breaks.

  13. Still won't play Netflix by scorp1us · · Score: 3, Informative

    The problem isn't in the upstream, it's in the downstream. Specifically their L3 interconnects.

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  14. And if you're in the vast FIOS-free zones... by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 2

    ...you'll be upgraded to pound sand with both hands.

    North Carolina was promised FIOS "real soon now" for years. At this point, it's pretty clear that if you don't already have it, you won't be getting it. Google blimps, drones, and sewer lines will bring us high-speed broadband long before Verizon significantly extends their buildout.

  15. No Extra Cost? I doubt it by coinreturn · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They like to raise their prices constantly. The extra cost will appear later this year - I guarantee it.