Long Time No Blogging

I can’t believe it has been so long since I blogged about anything, here or anywhere else. I think I forgot about why I was blogging in the first place. I was focusing on the wrong purpose to my blogging, which ultimately left me feeling less enthused. So many things tech and personal have happened since I last posted I almost don’t know where to start but I will manage, somehow.

My last post was about FIOS about to be installed. Obviously FIOS has since been installed and been running relatively smoothly for several months now. The installation went smoothly, although it did take more than the quoted 4-6 hours. In fact many people had told me via Twitter the installation would probably take less than a couple hours however, 7 hours later our technician finally finished the job. The lengthy installation wasn’t completely his fault. There was some trouble activating one of the cable cards for the Series 3 TiVo: an all to common issue I’m afraid. Tim, my new BFF (as I referred to him on Twitter that day), did an outstanding job with the installation. He was very detail oriented and aimed to please throughout the process. It was obvious from the very moment he walked in the door he wanted to do the job right and to our satisfaction. I was eager and therefore accommodating to the needs of a FIOS installation but truth be told I can’t see many customers complaining about the process.

Since the install our service has had a few hiccups. We’ve had to have one of the cable cards completely reset, a few times in fact. The Internet speeds have been good but for a couple weeks we began to see a steadily declining upstream connection. One minute it would be 17-18Mb and the next 14-15Mb. Verizon technical support wasn’t particularly helpful. More than one technician said there was nothing they could do once I ran the online “optimization” tool. This optimization tool does nothing more than adjust the MTU, the problem is we have more than one PC: two machines run Windows XP Pro and two Vista Home Pro. Verizon’s online tool may work on XP machines, it does nothing for Vista. Vista manages the MTU automatically, which means even after running it, Vista will readjust it as needed, when needed. After several more phone calls and persistence I finally managed to get them to send someone out. During the visit our speeds mysteriouslystarted improving and before he left things were back to normal. Since that visit more than a month ago we have not had any further speed problems. Despite this Internet speed problem Verizon FIOS is considerably faster than Charter, with the same speed rating. Charter is slower for a couple reasons. The biggest reason Charter is slow is the quoted speed and the real speed are further apart than FIOS. Charter’s 20Mb download speed has typically been closer to 17-18Mb while Verizon speeds have been within 1Mb or less of the advertised speed. The second factor in Internet speed where Verizon exceeds Charter is latency: The time is take for a request to be sent from one destination and for the destination to respond. Latency on Verizon has been one third or more that of Charter. Typical latency for Verizon has consistently been <60ms while Charter has been >200ms. 120ms difference may not sound like a lot but you definitely see the difference when surfing from site to site.

That about covers the basics of the Verizon FIOS install and a summary of the quality of service. Notice I didn’t mention anything about billing? That’s because billing is going to have to be a separate post unto itself. Yes, it went on for that long.