FiOS Follies
First announced in July 2004, Verizon FiOS couldn’t come to my neighborhood in New York City soon enough. Using fiber-optic connections instead of copper wire to bring telephone service, Internet, and television into the home, FiOS (which stands for Fiber Optic Service) was certainly worth the wait. So was the pain of the installation process and problem solving that followed.
After five hours plus, and a call for a more experienced installer, my FiOS service was up and running – more or less.
The installation consists of bringing the fiber-optic connection into the home and terminating it in an optical network terminal (ONT), which serves as an interface to inside wiring for telephone, television, and Internet access.
The TV service itself is superb, with better picture quality than our cable company (Time-Warner) had ever provided. The multi-room DVR (digital video recorder) system allows streaming of recorded programs (HD and standard) to other TVs in the home. Widgets provide local traffic and weather and local and national news on the top of the screen while programs continue in a slightly smaller size below.
The FiOS Interactive Media Guide has an easy-to-use tabbed interface and allows searching for words that appear anywhere in the description. One can remotely program the DVR via the Web (or using a Verizon mobile phone). The service features over 100 HD channels, 500 all-digital channels, and 14,000 video-on-demand titles (8,500 are free).
The Internet service is lightning fast. It consistently measures close to 20 Mbps, about seven times faster than my DSL service ever was. It’s so fast that my partner and I can each watch a different streaming TV show on our respective computers without any problem (with DSL, one show was frequently more than the service could handle).
It was the plain, old telephone service (known in the industry as “POTS”) that turned out to be the big problem. The day after installation, I noticed that many of my calls were not going through; instead, after dialing, I would hear an ACB recording (“We’re sorry, all circuits are busy…”). After weeks of investigation, this turned out to be a software error; my phone line was coded as an account disconnected for non-payment. I also found that I couldn’t place a call a few times a day; pressing the number pad would simply not break the dial tone. Then a reorder tone (sounds like a fast busy signal) would follow, then a message stating “if you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again.” I told the repair bureau it was a bad line card but they didn’t seem to believe me. This problem took over two months to resolve and involved dozens of phone calls and the implementation of odd fixes at the phone company’s suggestion (twice they had me unplug all of my phones and they replaced the ONT and also sent a technician to check the inside wiring). Two months later, the problem was determined to be a bad line card in the Nortel softswitch.
A few small glitches remain to date. The remote set-top box loses the connection to the main DVR several times a day and it also has trouble playing recorded programs longer than 30 minutes. In such cases, it loses track of where it is. (Verizon promises a fix for the first problem shortly and advises that the second problem is being worked on.) In addition, the problem in placing a call mysteriously returned for two days recently and then disappeared again.
By this time, you are probably wondering if getting FiOS is worth it – and my answer is a resounding “yes.”
The clear sharp television picture and the lightning fast Internet connectivity are simply head-and-shoulders above any other service I have seen and I saved the best for last. Even with faster speed and sharper picture, I’m saving money. A bundle including TV, Internet plus telephone service is $99.99 per month plus taxes and fees (previously I was paying 60% more for inferior service).
Jonathan B. Spira is the CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.
February 19th, 2009 16:50
Lies, damn lies and shiny glass.
When I first ordered FiOS I found the fiber behind my house wasn’t and had to work hard to convince them that there wasn’t really a fiber behind my house (the database is always right). I’ve already written about the many truck rolls it took to implement a simple keystroke change in a database so I could move a distinctive ring line to VoIP.
Despite all its wonders FiOS is not all that “lightning fast” compared with Comcast – 20Mbps vs 16Mbps – and both hit the network limits though FiOS still has faster up-speed. Verizon also offers 50Mbps but you rarely get anything near that speed. Comcast has made my house DISOSS-3 ready so thing may change again.
I have both Verizon and Comcast so I can do comparison testing. To connect between a FiOS and Comcast connection I’ve found the bits can go the long way, via New York and Chicago because there isn’t just “the Internet” – we have private Internets that interconnect only grudgingly and at a high cost.
At least Comcast doesn’t block my ports whereas I have to put work around Verizon’s arbitrary and perverse block on port 80. What good is their offer of 20Mbps up-speed when they block a port and make me work around that problem. Comcast also offers multiple IP address. It isn’t just about speed. As an FYI I do use Verizon for TV these days.
Confusing broadband competition with Internet competition is naïve and tragic. The idea of competition is that the we benefit from companies’ attempting to offer the best service. But this demonstrates the dark side of this competition – the internecine warfare between “Internets”. As long as you accept the idea that the Internet is just a bunch of private fiefdoms and silos you can call this competition but if the value of the Internet comes from the ability for all of us to communicate among a large community then this form of synthetic competition among phone companies and cable companies is a cruel hoax. We have competitive delivery not competitive connectivity.
It doesn’t help that Verizon doesn’t provide useful documentation on their EthernetóFiOS bridging though I did find I could run their VoD over a standard router so I don’t have to depend on their buggy access point. So not only is the competition bogus, the very idea that cable content must be tied to a delivery pipe is a lie. It’s just IP traffic and nothing but IP traffic.
New protocols like SVC – Scalable Video Coding – make it even easier to run video over any transport! And as people become more practiced in video distribution it makes even less sense to build private “video Internets” just like it doesn’t make sense to build private phone networks these days.
Hmm. I have some time today maybe I’ll make another stab at getting Verizon wireless to deign to tell me where $800 of payments came from – I don’t want to pay $158 bill till I find out if they owe me $800. But they don’t seem to have any mechanism for figuring this out. Hmm … and they want to be my gatekeeper? Not that their faux competition is any better. After dropping RCN I found they had outsourced billing to a collection agency. But then TWC sold my late mother-in-law’s account to a collection agency that seems determined to reach her.
http://frankston.com/?Name=IPAndSVC