The FIOS adventure begins

well

It was the one about narratives in games that really pissed me off. They credit the cheap rip offs and late comers as the innovators. They come up with ridiculous thesis that they have to warp the facts to fit, and then it just gets awful when they try to use EA sporting games to support the idea that a good narrative is essential to a good game. I think that was the second (and for me, final) episode.

FIOS install was a time sink

I had FIOS commercial Internet for 1.5 years because of the static IPs I could get. It worked great. When I didn't use the IPs and residential Internet, TV, and phone became available, I signed up for them. On the day I ordered the Residential service, about 3 weeks before the installation, my Internet (commercial) account was disabled. This was over the weekend before New Years. It took FIOS tech support 5 days to get it re-established. Someone didn't read the dates on the order and the scripts that run are quite functional. This time included me on the phone for 12-15 hours-on hold, waiting to talk to a rep, answering the same question 6-8 times with different reps.
On the Sunday before installation, I received an automated call verifying that I still wanted the appointment on Tuesday. I answered yes. My Internet (commercial) account was shut down again. Observation: Moving from Commercial to Residential service is a RARE event in VerizonLand, and there are few, if any, policies and procedures in place to troubleshoot this. This problem extends to order entry, order placement, tech support, network engineering, etc.
When Installation day arrived, the installation Techs were there nice and early (Verizon employees), they plugged in the Verizon Actiontec router, the Internet came up right away, the phone cut over just fine (getting away from a spaghetti wired phone box from my neighbors was very beneficial) and the TV even started OK. For a few days. Then, suddenly, a couple days later, the Guide (program information) button, and the VOD (video on demand) button didn't produce the expected information. After 10 or 11 days, 10 or so support experts, including a superviser in Everett, WA, assuring me that an additional 24-hour wait would give time to the proper group to complete the repair. Finally, at the end, a tech named John finally took ownership of the problem (what a concept-unseen anywhere else in the FIOS world), found out that there is 1 database for storing the individual network IP address for my house, and another database that stores the Verizon internal IP Addresses pointing to the internal Guide and VOD information servers and that one of the IP addresses was pointed at the Commercial side of FIOS.
Since this got sorted out, the service has been great-no trouble with the phone, Internet, or the TV! What a relief! I was beginning to wonder there for awhile.
Config: Coax from Actiontec router to outside, router to NetScreen 5 GT (firewall) internal WAP in bridge mode, and the rest of my internal network, both wired and wireless.

Verizon Set My House on Fire!

Verizon set my house on fire when they began my FIOS installation! Really!

They used hillbilly contractors, not Verizon employees, and the idiots actually drilled into my breaker panel box, almost electrocuted themselves (Too bad they didn't - It would have made for a great "Darwin Award"), and the electrical wiring feeding the breaker box caught on fire!

This gets better: When they realized what they had done, instead of even staying to try and put out the fire, the contractors ran out of the house and hopped into their truck and drove off, never to be seen again, so we called 911.

Verizon was resistant to paying for the damage until we told them we'd found an assistant DA who had a similar bad FIOS installation experience who was willing to indict them for arson, and when this happened, we were going to send a press release to all the local media outlets.

This got bumped up to a senior operations manager and they suddenly became very, very accomodating.

My thoughts

As much as it pains me to say it, our transition from Comcast to Verizon FIOS was actually pretty painless. We had Comcast for tv and internet, and Verizon for our land-line telephone, and ended up switching to Verizon for all 3. In the end, we got more reliable and faster internet, more HD channels (though the total number of channels stayed about the same), and the total bill actually went down about $25/month.

Here's the breakdown on our experience:
Verizon will supply a router loaded with their own custom firmware- ours was an ActionTec, but I can't say for sure if yours will be the same.

The router can connect to the outside world via either RJ-45 or coaxial inputs. If your install tech wires an RJ-45 connection for you to use, I believe you can simply replace the router with whatever model you want after he leaves. If they connect it through the co-ax, you have to use their router, but you can change the settings to turn it into a simple bridge and then insert your own router between the one they supply and your computers.

The router is managed through your browser, so as long as your 98 box has an internet browser and javascript, I don't see why it wouldn't work. Chances are they didn't want to teach their techs where normal network settings were in win98, so they just said it wouldn't work instead.

The router they supply does support 4 wired computers, plus 802.11 A/B/G with WEP/WPA.

For our install, the tech gave me the router, and I had all of our computers connected and on the internet by the time he managed to plug in the cable boxes for the tv. (I've since put the router in bridge mode and put my personal router back in the mix)

Normally I'm first in line to bash the huge corporations for their lousy service and terrible customer service, but honestly I can't complain this time. After 6 months of service, we've had one outage, which lasted under an hour, and everything else has been just peachy. Their customer service still bites pretty hard, but the internet/tv services have been far superior to our experiense with Comcast.

Verizon FIOS

I have been using Verizon FIOS for internet connection for several months. My installation did come with a combination modem/router/wireless AP.

I encountered no problems either with the initial installation nor with several months of use. I currently do not use internet phone service and I have maintained my Time Warner cable for TV.

I currently have one Dell desktop hard wired to the router and three laptops, two PC and one MAC connected using WiFi.

Ofcr124