Two weeks ago, I received some marketing stuff from Verizon about their new FIOS offering.  Three choices - 5Mb, 15Mb, and 30Mb.  There was only a few dollar difference between 5 and 15Mb, so I opted for more speed.  Go figure.

I've been waiting for this to be real since last year, when they dug up the front of my lawn to lay fiber, then had trucks up and down the road outside my development putting fiber on the telephone/power poles.

Just to be confusing, the technician showed up on time (actually, about 25 minutes earlier than he said he'd be here).  He pulled the run from the street to my house, put up the box outside, and installed the parts inside along with battery backup.  I hooked up the router and turned on my PC... and got signal!  Whoo hoo!

Then I went to http://infospeed.verizon.net and ran the speed test... and got 5Mb.  Much faster than my previous DSL speeds, but a third of the speed I'd ordered.  I guess it did sound too good to have everything work at once.  After talking to their support person, and explaining that it wasn't an issue with my computer (I wouldn't run their tweak/optimizer tool, which loads an ActiveX control that I have no idea about what it affects), I finally convinced them that yes, I do know how networks work (at least one of my certs says so), and they really needed to look at their own central office to see how the virtual circuit was configured.  That got me a network technician on the phone, who checked while I chatted with the support guy - and said, "it looks like we have something configured wrong".

It's nice to be validated once in a while.

It turned out to be more than he expected, so now a tech has to come to the house again (but doesn't need me to be here) while someone at the CO works with him to properly configure my circuit end to end.  Once that's done, I'm hoping that the beta bits and other huge file transfers I have to do just about weekly don't take days to complete.

Oh, and one cool thing is that since my phone line is now fiber, my voice calls are crystal clear.  One not so cool thing is that since I ordered FIOS, I've gotten at least four more marketing mailings about ordering it.