Review by mbrenner Location: Berwyn, Chester, PA, USA Cost: $99 per month (12 month contract) Install: about 14 days clean and fast Verizon Get FiOS

Pre Sales Information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Value for money: (ratings match consensus)

Pre-sales: FiOS Triple Play is still a mystery to Verizon operations.

My DSL (Speakeasy/Covad/Verizon) was terrific. My cable TV was horrid (Comcast). Phone was/is not important.

I wanted Internet/TV/Phone all in one connection.

I wanted a FiOS "Triple Play" offer.

I had to call VZ every month from Dec 2006 (PA approved VZ as a cable option) until late May 2007 when they finally offered a "triple play" for $99, with 5M/2M Internet, TV (with one digital STB), unlimited long distance, call waiting, answering service, and all installation included. (BTW, on Long Island they switched my mom from Cablevision/Optimum Online, by installing 15M/2M for the same $99 price.)

Order and Installation:

June 4, 2007 9 AM - Called in my order and scheduled install for June 22 (the earliest day I could be home for the installer.) I was advised that I would have to approve an extra $54 charge to wire the TV in the room that did not already have cable tv. Seemed like a fair price. The sales agent was excellent taking the order.

June 4, 6 PM - I came home to discover the subcontractor had already marked my property for install of the FTTP. WOW! They also left me a card telling me to look at their mark and put flags up for buried electric wires and/or invisible fence. I did this immediately.

June 8 - FTTP conduit was buried from the street to my house during the day. The invisible fence wire and the power to my front lamppost were cut. It seems the marking team had not marked the entire run they were going to dig. They only marked the part from the curb into the yard. They did not mark the 50' section parallel to the curb which crossed the dog fence wire and the lamppost wire. The subcontract manager finally got the invisible fence and electric wires fixed two weeks later.

June 22, 2007 8:30 AM - Installation day. The Verizon installer showed up 5 minutes EARLY. (You should see what is in the truck.) We did a walk through and I showed him where everything was. Since I was the first in my area to install, he had to plug in the fiber on the street back to the fiber to the neighborhood and then back to the trunk to the C.O. This took an hour or so. Next he pulled the 300' premises cable from the splitter in the middle of the block down to my house. Next he mounted the ONT (Optical Network Terminator) on the outside of the house and the battery backup in the basement. The ONT is a Tellabs ONT 1600-612 Single Family unit with jacks for 2 phone lines plus Ethernet and MoCA capable coax. (»www.tellabs.com/products ··· _612.pdf)

By 11 AM he had switched my phone from copper to fiber.

I had ordered 3 digital TV boxes but one room did not previously have cable. I approved the $54 extra charge for the wiring, just as I had been notified during the order process. It took about four hours to install the 3 boxes and the Internet router. (The ONT can drive the router via coax or Cat5e. VZ recommends and prefers coax and the installer also had to run a coax to my closet with my house Ethernet terminations.)

It was after 4 PM by the time the TVs were all working and the Internet was available. (I did not disconnect my Speakeasy DSL connection for another day.)

Now the challenge: The (awesome) Actiontec MI424WR 4-port wireless MoCA router comes with a default LAN IP address of 192.168.1.1. Because of my VPN at work, I needed to change the address. (The VPN at work uses 192.168.1.x so they said I cant use it.) I would not accept the install if the address was not changed.

The Verizon installer had never needed to change the default inside IP address. So we did lots of playing and discovered we needed to change BOTH the inside port of the router, AND the DHCP server block address range, and finally got the IP address changed from 192.168.1.x to 10.20.30.x.

Motorola QIP2500 Set Top Boxes are annoying. The Motorola QIP2500s speak IP for the OnDemand and certain other services. For some reason, even after getting a real IP address from the DHCP service in the router, they still broadcast to 169.254.1.255 using a 169.254.1.xxx address (probably based on MAC). I have 3 boxes, 2 have sequential MACs, the third is different. The 3 169.254.1.xxx IP addresses are ...222, ...54, and ...55. Does anybody know what this is about? Are they looking for a DVR or something?

6:00 pm School time. The installer sat down with my spouse and I, and walked us through all the features of the FiOS digital TV. He had programmed the FiOS remotes for our TVs, VCR, and DVD players. He made sure we could do everything. This was a VERY NICE TOUCH Verizon!!!

7:00 PM the installer finally pulled off with everything working perfectly.

August 8, 2007 - The six week status. Zero downtime, ALWAYS 5110/1800 Internet performance. Crystal clear TV, even on the analog sets. (Well of course they are only analog to the ONT on the side of the house.) Phone is phone.

Billing - Here is the rub. The phone service is still the regulated business. The TV and Internet are not. And they don't really talk together. So the phone company forgot to change my plan to the free unlimited calling. And the billing group has not figured how to put the discounts for the 3-play onto the bill yet. So I computed my own bill, called the business office and had the phone plan set up correctly (they did refund the long distance charges), and I paid the setup charges for the wiring and such. Next months bill should have the bundle discounts so we will see. From here on out it should be fixed. $99 + $9.98 for 2 extra TV boxes. Plus a long line of unbelievable taxes.

Summary----

Pre-Install: mistakes made and fixed.

Installation: The very best. Done on the day and time promised by a very good technician.

SIX WEEK SATISFACTION RATING- EXCELLENT

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