Waiting for Verizon..

[Tom Metro]

Stephen Adler wrote:
> Tom Metro wrote:
>> Didn't the difficulty you had in dealing with Verizon give you second 
>> thoughts as to whether you can rely on them as an ISP?
> Yes... that's why I'm keeping my current Comcast service for at least a 
> couple of weeks...

That's not quite what I meant.

The expectation for any modern broadband service is that it should have 
excellent uptime and high reliability. The question is what happens when 
something does break down the road. Perhaps something not as blatantly 
obvious as a complete service outage, but instead packet loss, bandwidth 
slowdowns, staled connections, DNS problems, etc. At this point you have 
become fully dependent on the service, and you're now at the mercy of 
the competence of Verizon support.

Have those of you that have been using FIOS for a while had positive 
experiences in dealing with Verizon support for more subtle and highly 
technical issues, or are you just crossing your fingers and hoping it'll 
never come to that?


> I get symmetric 25/25 performance.

Was your testing just to confirm Verizon's claims, or did Verizon ever 
give you reason to believe you might not see their claimed bandwidth? 
(Of course I'm sure they have lots of "best effort" wishy-washy wording 
in their contract, as no low-end ISP wants to commit to providing a 
guaranteed bandwidth.)


>> Did you purchase business-class service? I assume yes, given your 
>> mention of static IPs.
> yup.

You probably haven't had a need for this yet, but for others with 
business-class FIOS, have you tried getting custom PTR records for your 
static IPs?


> As best as I know, there is no port blocking and I can do anything I 
> want. Maybe there is some fine print I didn't read?

If I was going to depend on an ability to run servers - even for 
personal use - I'd want to be sure they were expressly permitted by the 
contract.


> I think its around $100 something for the 5 static IPs.

Sounds about right. I see $110 for 25/25 Mbps with a 1 year contract.

http://smallbusiness.verizon.com/products/internet/fios_pricing.aspx

I guess my objection to their pricing has always been that they charge 
an excessive premium for static IPs. (I wonder how that'll change when 
IPv6 starts getting rolled out.)

Of course it's still a great bargain if you look at it purely from a 
bandwidth perspective, and ignore that they offer the same thing with 
dynamic IPs for $20 less.

I think the price difference used to be more, as they used to start the 
business plans at $100 with non-symmetric bandwidth. Now I see the 
slowest link you can get with a static IP is 25/25.

If only somebody like Speakeasy resold FIOS...

(At one time Galaxy (gis.net) was a FIOS reseller, and it looked like 
there was going to be a competitive market of FIOS resellers, but it 
hasn't materialized, and Galaxy has since dropped it. A Google search 
for "fios reseller" turns up several hits, including a CA ISP that is 
undercutting Verizon's prices. But the trick isn't necessarily to get a 
better price, but a more competent support organization.)

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/