Verizon east and Verizon west will pretty much officially and practically cease to exist in around 11 months, if things progress on schedule. That is, everybody will be PPPoE and the service tiers will be identical. That means that re-splitting (we once were split, but Verizon west / ex-GTE died of neglect, from what I could tell... I wasn't hosting, yet... but it would be simply irrelevant, and just become a geographical divide, at this point, because of the convergence situation.
FIOS, on the other hand, is a strange brew of convergence by divergence... at first, we'll actually diverge from the mainstream DSL/POTS people, as we adopt fiber, until we all converge, again, with FIOS, way, way down the road. That's what the new forum is meant to respond to.
FIOS people will have different hardware, different packages, and a completely different delivery technology, not related to DSL. Billing and administrative details are still main forum acceptable, of course, in a general sense... also, as this develops, we'll have services
other than internet that will be delivered over the FTTP plant. Television, for example... and POTS... if and when fiber develops to the point that we start seeing fiber INSIDE plants in homes, the whole metaphor of networking and telephony will change in a very perceptible way. You can't run light over cat5... or into a standard 10/100 NIC or switch... or plug it into a standard telephone. Not directly. And whether that becomes much of an issue for a long time out, the outside plant's quite different... DSL won't traverse fiber, at all, just for starters. I'm guessing it'll be a side-by-side hybrid network, at first. But down the road we can expect that to be subject to change, as the copper plant ages.
As far as test results, that's a question to pose to site tools. The testing pages are maintained by the site, not the fora. I've always run head on into a list of high-bandwidth business account users, myself, when I tested... the first page is usually 10
M plus downside tests. A quick tip, though, that helps me and should be relevant to fiber is to input your zip code on the compare pages... since FIOS will be geographically deployed, you should get a fair sample of your area and be up against at least a few fellow FIOS users, that way... it's probably a good idea, overall, in fact, even for DSL, at least as a starting point. It helps to highlight what people on your CO and immediate neighboring CO's are getting, which can quickly suggest a benchmark for that area, in many cases... DSL performance, in the gross view, is a CO to CO thing, with some CO's being stellar performers, and others having load or tuning problems almost as a standard operating procedure, with any telco.
FIOS was a natural place for a forum split. Different technology, different problems, tips, tricks, discussions, actively in deployment, geographically distinct user bases, new areas added regularly... all the precursors for a useful, active, unique forum. I admit, I didn't jump on it, at first, either... partly because of how it was initially phrased. I couldn't see threads, here, for all of the diverse areas getting it, it would drown the forum in fiber. But when a new forum was suggested, all of the negatives I had
already considered for more dedicated threads were positives for a new forum. Traffic was my last reservation. I looked at the amount of fiber optics traffic we have, the Verizon homepage promoting "here and now" FIOS for some of us, but not all of us, and concluded we have a heavy enough FIOS discussion, day to day, it seems, to justify a dedicated sub-forum.
That was it, in a nutshell. So here we go.
Another consideration I had was that we're all interested in when and what we'll each see in our areas. Instead of searching a series of 3-800 post threads (the old "official" threads), and then having to look through the forum posts flagged "fiber", we can find the resources and active discussions in an orderly, full forum format down in Verizon Fiber, now.
We can also have resources on fiber technology and issues, generally, and referrals to the BBR »
Fiber Optic, where there's a more generalized topical focus on this new technology...