FWIW-
I signed up for Verizon's Business Fios
(fiber optic broadband) service a couple of weeks ago, and they installed it
last week.
<rant>
Now let me start by saying that if I
can buy the equivalent service for ANYTHING from anybody BUT Verizon, I do
it. Overall, their customer service stinks. I was an early adopter of Vonage, just to get away from Verizon's phone
service. And my company was a victim of Verizon's hideous network
design in hurricane Floyd, during which I never lost connectivity but I
could not move a packet because their billing center drowned.
</rant>
So when the consumer Fios advertising
blurb arrived a couple of months ago, announcing megabits of connectivity for
under $100/month, I was skeptical. I reviewed the TOS and found that they
specifically prohibit servers of any kind, and will not provide static IPs. That
killed the service for me, because I run a couple of backup servers at home and
I need the static IPs. There were other problems, but the no-server and no-fixed
IP policies were deal breakers. I called and asked about a business grade
service, and was told on no uncertain terms that business Fios was a concept,
but it was at least three years away from implementation.
But a friend of mine down the street
called around and found a Verizon person who was empowered to create Fios
business accounts. I called her and got a static block of five IPs with 15mbps
download and 2mbps upload. Straight pipe, no port blocking, no SMTP "you gotta
host with us" BS.
<rave>
The order process was very easy, and the
order taker was great. She wanted to be sure she understood what I needed,
and she needed to be sure that there was a good match between my needs and their
offering.
The installer was gracious from the start to the end, even to the point of
asking me for a brush so he could clean the snow off his shoes before he entered
the house. I could not ask for a better installer. He spent four hours setting
up the physical stuff, but he had only done non-business installs before. Not
surprising, since they are still not promoting Fios as a business service.
I spent two minutes setting up the router for a static IP, another two showing
him how to do it, and about ten to fifteen minutes explaining the difference
between dynamic and static IPs and the like. (The installer's lack of experience
was the only negative I can point to, and I expected it since Fios is
primarily a home service.)
I am not easily impressed, but I have
only one word to describe this service: WOW!
I am getting 15+mbps consistently from
test sites. My VPN to the data center runs almost as fast as my LAN here at
home. My backup mail server is running
without a hitch, as is my backup DNS. I have had zero downtime since the service
was installed, unlike my Covad DSL service which had downtime several times a
week.
</rave>
Anyway, sorry for the length of this, but
I thought it would be interesting to all to see where the telcos are going for
broadband. Their future clearly is fiber, and so far it looks really, really
good, at least at Verizon.
-Dave Doherty
Skywaves, Inc.
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