Verizon FIOS: One Year Later

What I can tell you right now is that the technology itself is just great. Unlike the myriad of horror tales I've received about Comcast, I have no bad news to report about Verizon.

Of course, avoiding Verizon's customer service at all costs helps. I mean, I'd love to up my speed and give Verizon more money. But, frankly, I'm terrified that Verizon customer service will screw my account up. I don't want them to touch it. At all. Ever. That's how low my regard for Verzion customer service is.

Report: Throughput and Lag (5mbit down / 2mbit up)

The best way I know of to test this is with (legal) P2P file sharing, and test the responsiveness of general web browsing. Now, as you know, Comcast is in hot water for throttling bit-torrent traffic. When I used to be a Comcast customer from 2002 to 2007, all it would take was one or two P2P downloads and my entire connection would choke. No traffic, P2P or otherwise, could get through.

On FIOS, even when I'm P2Ping 600kbit down/200kbit up, I can still check my gmail and use IM just fine. That's right. I can download a 350mb file in under ten minutes, seed it all night, grab four more files, and my internet browsing experience is just fine. In fact, I have yet to find a torrent that fully saturates my line.

Throughput rating: A+

Report: Reliability

Let me put it this way: my Comcast connection was so unreliable that I used to have a ping monitoring service test my IP every hour so that I could clock just how much down time I had: roughly 8%. That number shot up to 30% one week when Comcast was rolling out new equipment and performing the great IP shuffle in my area.

My FIOS connection goes down for up to five minutes around half past midnight every third month or so. That's 0.000003% down time. Over the past year, I can count on my connection to be up and running more than you can count on getting a live person when you call 911.

Reliability rating: A+

Report: Versatility

Well, ok, nobody's perfect. Inbound port 80 is blocked. Fine. I can host a website on Dreamhost with 5TB of transfer for $5.95/mo. Verizon also blocks outbound port 25. Also fine. I host my e-mail on gmail with 25gb of storage per address. If I really wanted to, I could host these things myself with a FIOS business account. But, why bother?

True, Comcast totally left these ports open and I could host whatever I wanted. Of course, the minute you start a blogging shitstorm, and a million users flood your box, you're pretty much screwed.

But, other than that trade-off, I'm very pleased with how I can use my connection. Xbox 360, of course, works great. I streamed a video with VLC player to the public just fine. I can telnet to other boxes, or have other boxes telnet to me on a custom port. So, no real complaints here.

Versatility rating: B+

Report: Overall

While I still harbor an enormous grudge over how my install was handled, and the general state of Verizon's customer service. I'm absolutely thrilled with the performance of the technology itself.

A lot of you have written in with your similar FIOS horror stories, and a few good experiences. From your experiences, I think it's clear that Verizon customer service will continue to be an absolute clusterfuck of the greatest proportion. A few people have reported speed, reliability and other issues. All I can say there is keep troubleshooting and reach out to knowledgable friends for answers.

Overall rating: A-

Related Links