Review by pkinc 
Posted: 1.5 years ago
member for 2.3 years, 310 visits, last login: 202 days ago
 Lexington,Middlesex,MA
 $49 per month (12 month contract)
 about 10 days
 "Very Fast Speeds, Rock Solid Stability, Excellent FiosTV as well"
 "None"
 "Get It If You Can"
| Pre Sales Information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:
(ratings above consensus)
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Fios Internet became available in July, I was going to wait until Dec for things to shake out, but Comcast Internet was so unreliable (with constant outages and repeated visits by the local techs, one time a distribution amp had gone 30db high, that 1000 times too high a signal), I ordered it on Sept 10, 06.
About 5 days later the Fiber Optics cable was run to outside the house. Five days after that, the tech showed up, 6 hours later I had 15/2 for $44.95.
The Actiontec router I was given had poor Wifi connectivity and a clumsy interface, plus no VPN, so it got put back in the box and replaced with my Linksys WRT54GL v.1.1 with DD-WRT VPN v23sp1 5.30.06 firmware, running an OpenVPN Server with SSL/TLS certificate based authentication. It's great to be able to connect to my home network from anywhere and securely map network drives, upload/download files and run Remote Desktop. As a connective reliability test, I used PingPlotter to ping a west coast server and a Moscow server every 5 seconds for several weeks. In about 200,000 pings, there were about 5 lost ICMP packets in any of the Verizon parts of the network, and a few more beyond their network boundaries.Your mileage may vary.
In the 8 months since installation, I have had 1-30 second outage, and a few more 5-10 second outages. That's it. Ping times everywhere seem to have dropped by about 10-20 ms. In Jan. 07 I upgraded to 20/5 for $49.95. At either
service level, the speeds never drop regardless of time of day or weekend. With software that makes multiple connections to a server,(Free Download Manager is ok, ReGet is better) the full 20mbps download speed is achieved, filling CD's in under 6 minutes, and 39 minutes to fill a 4.7Gb DVD.
My IP Address never changed in 7 months until a power blackout that covered the entire area for about 6 hours. Upon restoral of power, a new IP Address was assigned to me, and that has not changed since.
In Dec 06 I got Fios TV, the installation was excellent and professional all the way, the install tech knew exactly what he was doing. HD Picture Quality is the same as Comcast HD, but regular TV Quality is Far Superior to Comcast and even Direct TV. The TV tech had never used a non-Actiontec router before, but was willing to try it. I asked him to install a NIM (Network Interface Module), a small black plastic box that gets IP Addresses from any dhcp enabled router and assigns them through the coax (MoCA) to each set top box. Once the software downloads were complete and enabled, everything worked just fine. You can go into set top box setup by pressing Power and Select at the same time and you'll go into a Diagnostics Screen, pick Upstream Modem and see the IP Address its been assigned as well as that MAC Address.
Yes, my copper phone line is gone and with it all the hums, crackles and dead shorts that occurred on very old wires in wet weather.
I've only called Tech Support once, because I couldn't get the obtuse password that came with the account setup to work, the font made several lower case l's looks just like i's, etc. They answered quickly and changed the login password.
I've noticed the prices slowly inching up, but still a much better deal than what I had with Comcast. If Verizon is listening, I'd suggest that they hold off the bean counters who are demanding price increases and go for the larger market share instead. Overall Verizon gets a solid A from my experiences with them.
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