Poppa's Lowdown on Verizon FiOS for Business
Quick and Dirty:
- Business class service is completely unblocked both ways
- comes with 5 statics (you must ask!)
- 15 megs down
- 2 megs up
- $99/mo, free install
- 54meg wireless router, $64.95 and a $100 rebate on it.
Business must bill separate from residential/consumer services. Kept the residential copper POTS. The business people ("Encore Group") are not selling video yet, or wireless phone. Biz voice can be added.
Detail:
Because I spent some time writing to someone about my experiences with FiOS, and saw recent traffic on NoVALUG and MA-Linux recently on this, I thought I'd share...
Verizon Business FiOS.
I got Business FiOS punched into my house (no phone) and migrated from cable a few weeks ago. Needed it to do a bunch of work stuff from home and dump the office space. Needed unblocked service. It's 15 megs down, 2 up, and 5 statics, for $99.
My neighbor got FiOS residential and FiOS-TV at the same time.
The downside:
- - They put a big box (the almighty and astoundingly expensive "ONT") on the outside, with a bunch of wires drilled into the side of your house. Looks like a wart on your ass with a few hairs hanging.
- - This means there is a cat5 coming out the side of the house, too...into the weather. Hmmmmm.
- - Residential service has a crammed phone rollover. I.e. they try to make you switch off your copper POTS line when you order FiOS. If you get a dumb rep, they will tell you that you "must" switch. It si possible to attempt to keep your copper. The techs tell me they try to _clip_off_ the actual copper when they can.
- - Neighbor's phone service got really screwed up when he tried to order the FiOS without phone switchover. Line got switched off anyway in the system, but no new line brought up on the FiOS. At least his VoIP worked.
- - Neighbor has had many problems with the TV service. Live TV dropped off. Technically, the system is BPON with live TV coming down over a separate light freq and AM-VSB modulated (data is 622 megs down/155 megs up on two other freqs). Demand TV is over IP. Don't you wish you knew the protocol. This means the live TV is analog and it's possible for one or the other to drop (you'd think it's all or nothing). The techs couldn't figure it out for a long time and ended up replacing the neighbor's ONT.
- - Neighbor has had occasional "glitches" with the IP service.
- - They screwed up my static assignment...they blew the order entry and only gave me one IP. Many major long phone calls later, (and a week) it got straight. But I couldn't make DNS entries till it was done, cause the singles and the blocks come off separate netblocks.
- - There was trouble with the internal order system, all kinds of problems because they have a number of systems in place internally for provisioning. Sales, billing, line provisioning, dispatch, trouble tickets, router setups are all separate systems. They are working the bugs out of this for FiOS.
- - So they also screwed up the rebate on my wireless router.
- - Techs arrived onsite and had no idea how to do a business install. Kept telling me it would be dhcp/PPPoE. I knew otherwise, and they were surprised when nothing worked until I punched the static IP into my Linux box.
- - You get an all day window for the install. Murphy: they came out at 4:30 pm. Good thing I was working from home that day.
- - The residential IP service is PPPoE. I hate PPPoE.
- - The ONT Pb battery is "user replaceable". That means you buy one every few years to get 6 hours of POTS in a power fail. The CO powered copper lines will run longer, so I'm keeping my copper until they give me a really good reason to drop it.
- - Business service is practically unadvertised. You're definitely in the beta zone there.
- - Can't order TV on a business account yet, but you can order that on a residential account over the same pipe.
- - They are slammed with orders around here. They are pulling techs in from other regions to get the work done as well as teach them. Total bleeding edge stuff. There are a very few markets launched in the US so far. Some of FL, TX, VA, and NJ.
- - They enter your static block as an official subdelegation in ARIN. Yeah it looks cool, but your activities are not anonymous.
- - Their phone system is a miserable voice-recognition IVR. It never gets you routed right. Even their techs tell me they get lost in it. They tell me to say "tech support" so I'll drop thru the system and they can route me to the right department.
The upside:
- - There are dedicated techs for FiOS. They were handpicked and have clue. They are very very nice. Like really nice. They always stay on the line during a handoff to another department. And many times after.
- - Current technology is the best. The unit runs on a 32 node shared 622 meg ATM backbone. 622 megs into your house. Sky's the limit. The next round of gear (summer 06) will be GPON, which will put all the video onto the IP side. I think that is gonna gobble up too much bandwidth. The BPON will have more headroom coz of the separate analog video.
- - The box has 1 F-style analog video out, 1 cat5, and 4 POTS lines. All are brought thru weatherproof grommets.I think the POTS is run over the ATM layer, but can't swear to that.
- - The techs will put the box in your garage if you want. That's what I did, coz I didn't trust the weatherproof grommets protecting a cat5 connection. I've seen plenty of corroded outdoor NTU connections.
- - Field techs were very nice and fished their cat5 all the way to the basement.
- - Neighbor gets local HD channels, PVR, gobs of live channels, some stuff is on demand. Included with his HBO service, he can order anything HBO is showing that month on demand. Someday prolly everything will be demand and the satellites will go bust.
- - At least they emailed the IP address(es)in advance to me.
- - They say they wanna dump all PPPoE in 6 months.
- - Business CoS FiOS has no port blocking. Cox never could figure out why I was asking about this, or give me a straight answer either. When I called to cancel, they asked why. I said "coz I can't buy unblocked service." Cox never got my ebilling right and kept dropping me off every coupla months.
- - Great latency. I am now 2 router hops from MAE-East. It traceroutes as 4, but I can tell it is 2 pairs of interfaces on two routers. One on my end, the other at the nexus. Verizon was efficient with their routing. I am the low ping bastard now. Many pingtimes are in single digits ms. I could map the Internet from my couch.
- - My service has been totally solid (unlike the neighbor). More reliable than my office connection was. I let a few Linux ISOs saturate the pipe for a week straight and there was no blip in the upstream ever.
- - ...And last but not least: Totally insane bandwidth. OMG it's geek heaven. I have a bigger pipe than most businesses in the USA. d/l tests show I'm getting exactly what I bought (QoS is strict). And I bought the slowest business CoS you can get. The techs told me some rich people are ordering the highest tier without thinking so they can brag on the golf course....I can't imagine that kind of b/w.
I d/l'ed an Ubuntu DVD in 70 minutes with bottorrent/azureus on a 400MHz P2 running SLES 9. Apt-get updates run like a gatling gun on an A-10. Try blowing thru a 500 package d/l in like 10 minutes from us.debian.org. Get a seatbelt for this stuff. I you leave Azureus running, you will be the king seeder in short order. And then not notice it's running while you go on a savage websurfing expedition. The slower (upload) side actually revealed the packet limits on my ol' Firebox 1000. I can "feel" the other end now all the time and tell if they're in a datacenter or not. I have an Internet hosting service in my basement now. I very quickly forgot all the downsides and cancelled my cablemodem service in a week.
So much for the "short" story. :-)
Poppa's summary: I had a compelling reason to spend the money on it, and approached it with the sense of a beta tester. I am fat and happy now and would do it all over again.
