Review by Vitanic 
Posted: 1.8 years ago
member for 1.8 years, 20 visits, last login: 41 days ago
 Rockville Centre,Nassau,NY
 $34 per month (12 month contract)
 about 11 days
 "3x my old DSL speed for $5 more"
 "No FIOS TV available yet"
 "An easy transition for great speed at a great price."
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(ratings match consensus)
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I knew that FIOS has been run along the street on the poles about 7 months earlier, but I don't remember getting any form of "Congrats, you can have fiber" message. Had I not known it was run, I might not have known it was available.
I wanted to upgrade the wiring in the house myself to network the house computers (off of wireless) & upgrade POTS wiring. The house was built in the 1950s which had considerable white braided 3 wire. New lines (2coax, 2cat3 & 1cat5e) were run to the major rooms throughout the house terminating i new jacks. All cat3/cat5e was to concentrate at a 48port cat5e patch panel ($10-ebay). There also was no convenient outlet where I wanted the router to be, so I had to put in a 3prong outlet as well.
I ordered FIOS over the internet; 1st available date was over 1 week away. 3 days prior, the drop was run from the telephone pole to my house with enough left over to install the ONT in the interior of my house in the basement if the installer could do that. On installation day, the installer agreed to install the ONT in the basement, but didn't have a drill bit large enough. After about 90 minutes, the line was fished through. Hanging & installing the remaining equipment took about 2 hours.
It was a simple matter of configuring my Mac OS X computer to connect to the router. I logged into the actiontec router while the installer removed the copper aerial. The router is pre-configured (via the firmware) to connect to Verizon's servers and get onto the internet. Once I was able to see the router, I was connected to the internet too. Its a relatively full featured router. Its no Linksys wrt54g with dd-wrt firmware, but I was able to get the hang of it. I immediately updated the actiontec's firmware to the most recent. Getting it to give my main computer a static IP took repeated attempts, but eventually it took. There are 2 things I miss: 1 is snmp for my mrtg graphs & iog totals; the 2nd is not being able to get a new IP for things like rapidshare. With DSL I could power-cycle the modem for a new IP; FIOS seems to give me the same IP when I release the old one via the router. I'll cope.
I ordered 10/2 @ 34.95/mo - speed tests were all over the place. The highest speeds achieved (speakeasy.net) were 10061/1808 which seems close to real world tests (922k down for newsgroups - deep in offpeak / 205 up for ftp). I was previously a VerizonDSL customer with 3.0/768 (real world 3.0/576). I was frequently knocked off during thunderstorms - even 20 miles away. A thunderstorm passed the other night, and the FIOS connection was totally stable.
It was a very smooth transition - there hasn't been a whole lot of downside to being on FIOS.
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