Verizon, Fiber Or Die? 291
dynamator writes "I live about 550 meters from my Verizon central office. I pay for their higher-tier 'Power Plan' DSL service, which boasts 3 Mbps down and 758 Kbsp up. For the past year, I've enjoyed excellent performance on this line. However, this past month Verizon has been hooking up my neighbors with FiOS, their new fiber-to-the-home system, and guess what, my connection speed and dependability have taken a nosedive. What can I do to build the case that this is really happening? Will anyone, least of all Verizon, care? Are they making me a fiber offer I can't refuse?" We discussed a few times last year what Verizon may be up to.
You do not deserve fiber! (Score:5, Funny)
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8Mbit? Come on... Verizon is offering 20/20 symmetric service for less than Comcast's pathetic "PowerBoost".
But wait! Then you go on to say you can't get the full 8Mbit? Why are you still on the bandwagon?
Re:You do not deserve fiber! (Score:5, Funny)
HAH! My speed is faster than your speed, and my modem is bigger too. And don't let me get started on the size of my hard drive, it's really, really big!
Ok, when I was little it was all about the size of your carburetor.
Get off my lawn.
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And for $10-$15 more a month (depending on what other services you get from them) they'll bump it up to 30 mbps and unblock the server ports.
Oddly, FIOS's starting package around here is 10 mbps down for the same price Cablevision has always charged for 15. And the FIOS price goes up fast as you go to the higher tiers.
Re:You do not deserve fiber! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:You do not deserve fiber! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You do not deserve fiber! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:You do not deserve fiber! (Score:4, Insightful)
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I figure my last resort is to file fraud claims with my credit card about the overbilling.
Oh yeah, and if you don't have phone and cable, they only let you have their service by bill
Re:You do not deserve DSL! (Score:3, Interesting)
Congratulations on your DSL. They won't even sell me DSL, and fibre to the curb is out of the question since it is 15 miles to the nearest curb.
Verizon doesn't care, and the won't. When our dialup went from steady-for-hours to a few minutes at best, it took us all kinds of hell raising over a number of days to get them to fix it. Now we are back to 24K dialup. Forget 33.6, and forget any notion of 53K.
Well, not quite. Yesterday I put up a skywa
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I am content with my $42.00 top tier DSL.
Fios is available, and gee, I have to pay them $99.00 a month because I cant unbundle the other crap from the internet service. I dont want to pay $99.00 a month for their other crap. I dont want the other crap. Stop forcing me to take your other CRAP!
DSL has a law forcing them to unbundle it from phone service. That law does not cover Fios.
Re:You do not deserve fiber! (Score:4, Insightful)
I can get comcast out to my house, sign up for service, use it for a month, and then disconnect. No worries, no fees, no nothing.
It's the same bitch I have will cell carriers. Why the fuck can't I go out and buy my own phone and attach to your network for a month or three of service?
Seriously. If your cell/internet/cable network is soooo awesome, I'll *WANT* to stay with you. I shouldn't have to lock myself in for two years...
Get a neighbor to help test your connection? (Score:5, Informative)
Could you see if you can use a program like Netcat to stream a large amount of data from your system to theirs, and see what kind of throughput you get? If Verizon is really not giving you the bandwidth you're paying for, this may be one way to prove it.
There are some kinds of connection shaping that this test won't detect, but at least it's a start.
Re:Get a neighbor to help test your connection? (Score:5, Informative)
Iperf [nlanr.net] is excellent for this, especially if you want to test details like packet size, port number, UDP vs TCP...
Re:Get a neighbor to help test your connection? (Score:5, Informative)
*Speed comparison based upon performance with a 56.6 Kbps modem. Actual speed may vary. Actual throughput speed will vary based on network and Internet congestion among other factors.
What affects my connection speed?
When you connect to the Internet using Verizon High Speed Internet, the speeds that you will experience will vary based on a variety of factors, including the following:
There are these problems when testing speeds to your neighbor.
Maybe one day we'll see a class action lawsuit on various ISPs that claims they intentionally lied about the average speeds customers should see, But I'm not holding my breath.
If I were you... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If I were you... (Score:4, Insightful)
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They won't care (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They won't care (Score:5, Interesting)
Rogers and Bell are just as bad up here as well. I've spent 7 hours on the phone (15 minutes total talking, rest of the time on hold) with Bell resolving billing issues. With Rogers I lost service in Toronto for 10 days, and the rep actually accused me of lying that my modem wasn't online - he claimed he was pinging it - and became abusive. I hung up on him. The next day Rogers discovered subway workers or someone else had cut a line that caused my outage. Why they didn't figure something was up when the rest of the neighborhood was complaining, I don't know. It certainly couldn't have affected just my place.
Re:They won't care (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They won't care (Score:5, Insightful)
~Rebecca
Re:They won't care (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, in 2006 Merck sold the marketing rights to a cancer drug to a small company named Ovation, who then charged exorbitant rates to recoup the costs. Merck kept the sales proceeds, and continued to produce the drug, but Ovation was the company charging patients ten times more. Ovation's business model is to act as a buffer for large pharmaceutical firms that want to get a large payday out of a niche drug without getting their hands dirty.
For more information, check See No Evil: When We Overlook Other People's Unethical Behavior [ssrn.com] (Gino, Moore and Bazerman 2008) and The Preference for Indirect Harm [springerlink.com] (Royzman and Baron 2002, Social Justice Research).
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I worked for one of the major US ISPs, and generally the layers of interdepartmental communications were so obscure there was nothing you could do.
In truth most of us loved outages because it meant we could tell the person that the problem was on our end and hang up and tell the next person. If it was a problem on the users end, then we'd have to do troub
Fishers center! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Part of getting service from anyone is leading them to a default choice that serves you, and that means
describing your problem in the right terms.
Re:They won't care (Score:5, Informative)
File a complaint with the state Public Utilities Commission.
I did it in Illinois where it can be done online. Miraculously within two weeks I had supervisors from falling all over themselves trying to solve my problem, and what had been broken for months got fixed in a matter of days.
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Write the CEO. I had tons and TONS of problems getting AT&T service (both phone and DSL) setup. Executive customer service wasn't very nice and didn't really do anything for me.
So I wrote the CEO.
All of a sudden I had numerous people calling me and doing anything they could to help me.
You can read about my experience here [foobarsoft.com] and here [foobarsoft.com]. I didn't think it would work, but I was out of options. I'm glad I did it.
Have you called them? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Have you called them? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no winning with some people (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There's no winning with some people (Score:5, Informative)
Re:There's no winning with some people (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:There's no winning with some people (Score:5, Informative)
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The Ford Model (Score:2)
The great news is the new ones don't explode.
The bad news is porch lights will flash as you drive down the street because everyone will think you're the pizza guy and missed their house.
(nb.: that last one is from some comedian, I don't remember who. Please don't sue me.)
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AT&T and Uverse (Score:4, Interesting)
Supposedly it is blazing fast, but AT&T doesn't offer static IP addresses on Uverse......oh well........
Re:AT&T and Uverse (Score:4, Informative)
Ever heard of Dynamic DNS [wikipedia.org]?
I use FreeDNS [afraid.org] and find it be reliable and easy to use. Disclaimer: I have no financial or other interest in the site except that I find it useful.
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Re:AT&T and Uverse (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure how the smaller ISPs are, but most of the time the big guys want to make people pay for the staticness if it is available at all.
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THEN......it took almost a month for AT&T to reconnect the DSL
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Average Handling Time plus Average Value Added Service per call == even when getting assistance for a faulty service you're a commodity..
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Funny thing is, the BEST support I got from AT&T was one of the tech guys who actually came out, and decided he'd go to bat for me. He gave me his number, and his bosses, and he spent a good hour on the phone being shuttled around AT&T. One of their own employees, getting the run around. I didn't feel so bad. He did get it fixed though.....finally. Kudos to that employee.
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I'm your neighbor, and I drink your milkshake! (Score:5, Funny)
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There Will Be Blood.
Verizon and high pressure tactics (Score:5, Interesting)
Example, I've pushed a half dozen people away from Verizon when I explained that their costs for the same service would actually RISE if they switched away from Cox.
In one case the sales droid for Verizon told one former co-worker of mine that Verizon owned all the coax cable that Cox used. That's complete and utter bullshit. Cox owns all the coax.
Re:Verizon and high pressure tactics (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess it helps my cognitive dissonance that I've been around the block enough times that I've been screwed by all the companies. My favorite story about our cable company was when they held on to our checks for 2 weeks then charged us late fees. So we switch to direct-debit (yeah, young and naive at the time). Anyway, they DEBIT our accounts 2 WEEKS LATE then DEBIT the late fees as well. So while Verizon is evil, they don't seem any eviler than any of the others to me.
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That said, you pay only $105 a year? That's a hell of a deal.
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Did you mean per month? $105 a year would be insanely good for DSL just by itself (that's under $10 month).
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Um, less than $9 a month for phone, TV and freaking 20/5 fibre is "not bad"? If that's a typo and you meant "month" - hell, I still pay more than that just for a lousy 6/768 DSL connection.
Horrible Customer Service (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Horrible Customer Service (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's what will happen:
They'll come install a second ONT on your house. You'll get 20% faster speed. You'll pay about 5% less. You won't have PPPoE and the associated latency anymore. You'll get 24/7 access to live, helpful customer service reps. Plus you'll have the option of static IPs for a fee should you decide you need them.
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But in my area, they dropped PPOE for FIOS about 1-2 years ago. If you put in PPOE credentials it ignores it at this point. I only found out because I've had FIOS for 3 years, and last year I added TV. When the tech replaced my router with their actiontec, he didn't put in any credentials, and said that had been dropped some time ago.
Also, if you're nice to the installer, they'll put the ONT inside your house which is far more convenient.
I only got one word for you... (Score:2)
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No Way.
AT&T 3/512 is $49.99/month ($54.ish including taxes) with no phone number and no contract.
Speakeasy 2/128 was over $125/month and needed a two-year contract.
I could install two and a half AT&T lines for the cost of one, slower, Speakeasy line. This was downtown Chicago last Spring. YMMV.
At least you can get FiOS... (Score:5, Insightful)
...because in Boston, which just so happens to be the silicon valley of the east coast (and has been for decades), I can't get FiOS.
Why? Verizon is holding the entire city hostage and refusing to do a fucking thing until they get a state-wide cable TV franchise license so they don't have to play on the same field as the cable operators (who have always had to negotiate per-town.) Look at the verizon deployment maps; it's a sea of blue and green, except for a giant void near Boston.
They've fed all sorts of bullshit to people; at one point, they were claiming that they were not doing "metropolitan areas." Funny: I guess New York City and DC aren't metropolitan areas? Everyone in the burbs and even the boondocks in eastern MA gets FiOS, but no, not Boston...
Re:At least you can get FiOS... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:At least you can get FiOS... (Score:5, Informative)
and no, we don't get FIOS either.
technology center of the US and we can't get fiber.
I see many roads are torn apart. not sure what they are digging up and doing but they are NOT planting fiber, that much is clear.
(at least not consumer or customer fiber. maybe they think terr-a-wrists are underground so they keep digging up our streets...)
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SF and the whole bay area have no FIOS service. The best I can get is 16mbps from Comcast. And it ain't comcastic.
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Re:At least you can get FiOS... (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing that happened was that the Boston area IT firms were largely minicomputer outfits (like DEC and Prime) or special purpose engineering workstations (Apollo, Symbolics), not to mention many spin-offs and laboratories involved in advanced CS work. The thing was the area's IT market got hit by a kind of perfect storm in the late 80s and early 90s: the collapse of the minicomputer market segment, the flagging of investor interest in artificial intelligence, the weakening of the workstation market, and a post Soviet Union drop off in government spending on the ultra-high-tech defense research that was a regular source of business creation in the university rich Boston area. At the same time, continued high property values made it less attractive for young engineers graduating from Boston schools to stay here.
Still, the Boston area continues to grow high tech startups in a variety of technical fields because of the sheer volume of academic research here; it's just that we haven't experienced the next big thing after the informatics boom of the 70s and 80s, and we missed out largely on the Internet bubble of the 90s. When the next thing happens, say if biotech takes off like informatics did in the 70s, we'll probably see Boston as an early hot spot, as it was in the 40s through 80s for computers.
Re:At least you can get FiOS... (Score:4, Informative)
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I'd check availability [verizon.com] in your particular part of boston. It doesn't seem like Verizon is holding anyone hostage, so much as rollout is taking longer than
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no competition = zero customer service (Score:5, Insightful)
Line interference or impedance (Score:4, Insightful)
Backbone bandwidth oversold (Score:2)
Go Cable (Score:3, Informative)
Most likely if FIOS is around, the local Cable Co. is probably price matching Verizon's FIOS Service. Possibly beating Verizon's price. Although be warned. Depending on the Cable Co, it could be worse service than what Verizon is giving you.
Verizon's tech service has been going downhill for awile. My first experience with it was they couldn't hook up a friends house for some reason because he's close to a state border. After dicking with Verizon for two months of appointment cancellations and broken activation promises he called the Cable Co. (in this case, Adelphia) and had Broadband in his house in three days. Then when he canceled the DSL service he never received, they charged him for two months of service and a breach of contract for service he never received.
Another example is two weeks ago I was working on a PC who already had Verizon. He was on the basic plan and I recommended that he upgrade to the power plan. He called them and asked for the upgrade from basic to power and they said it would take a few days (Vs Time Warner's and Armstrong's "call to upgrade and get the speed instantly" support) A few days later, he gets an e-mail that welcomes him to Verizon and happily tells him that he's now paying the power plan price for basic tier service. In other words. Verizon happily raised his bill $10 a month for the exact same level of DSL service he was already receiving. Thankfully he got that strengthened out after talking to a billing rep during his work hour since billing closes at 5PM and tech support had no clue what was going on.
Don't jump to conclusions (Score:5, Informative)
So my point is not to jump to conclusions. There could be a physical problem with your line that happened about when the FiOS was rolling out. Try hooking your modem directly to your Network Interface Box (usually on the side of the house) with all of your interior wiring disconnected (should just be a little jumper going into a regular phone jack - unplug it and plug your modem straight in). If your throughput goes up, you have a problem with your interior wiring. If it doesn't, the DSL provider is obligated to fix the problem. Make sure you tell them that you hooked your modem up directly to the network interface box, because the tech person should then immediately schedule someone to come out instead of having you try bridging your DSL modem and a bunch of other worthless garbage. They will still probably tell you to hard-reset your modem, but after that then they should send someone out. As in my case, it might take several different techs to find someone that can actually help. Same with support on the phone. Some people would randomly pick things out of some list a computer showed them, and ask me to follow various worthless steps. Other people knew exactly what was not wrong, based on what I told them up front, and so they didn't beat around the bush.
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Modem kept dropping, cable boxes kept losing connection for the guide and the digital channels. They sent 5 techs, and the last one finally said "Enough with this" and re-ran from the pole to the house, crossing a very busy 2-lane for semis between two local small cities. He helped run some coax in the house, even left us
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One Big Reason: Cost (Score:2)
I work for a telco. (Score:5, Interesting)
If it's the former Verizon won't help you. If it's the latter, a tech should be able to fix it. If you're only 550m from the CO you might not have an access cabinet in between you and the CO, but there should be many pairs into the pedestal near your house. A tech should be able to just do a pair change and fix it. The other thing that could happen is a port change in the CO. Both of these are quick, as long as the CO is manned. We have about 25 in this city, and only 1 is manned full time.
How paltry.... (Score:5, Informative)
$50/month here in Japan gets me 100Mbps (up and down) FTTH with no caps in place. Yes, you can all say "well Japan is such a small and densely populated country so of course they can all be wired up like that", which I hear so often. Well, why can't the US do this for their main cities as they are all densely populated. If they were to take this approach and then build high bandwidth links interconnecting these cities it could be done.
But the real problem here is that the telecoms and politicians are too busy filling their pockets and planning how to spy on you to care about doing anything to improve their networks.
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but you are still right, teleco's in the USA are too busy giving the government a handjob to look after their customers.
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I agree, politics play way too much of a role in anything.
they already got paid (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh stop (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I'm not trying to brag here, I am making a point that different countries are, well, different. Even different areas of the same country are different. So it is great that you can get cheap Internet access, but have you considered everything involved in that? Have you considered that your situation might not be the same as everyone else's? Is it even the same in all of Japan? Can you get that same access in, say Tono (which despite being rural for Japan is larger than many US towns)?
Another part to consider is are they really giving you 100mbit Internet, or are they giving you a 100mbit connection to a WAN that is connected to the Internet? What I mean is generally speaking in the US, when you buy a connection you get the given bandwidth to anywhere. Your connection to your neighbour is no faster or slower than to anywhere else. The ISP has sufficient upstream to support that to their backbones and so on. So with my 10mbit link, I find that I get that to pretty much anywhere that also has sufficient bandwidth. It isn't just things on my network, it is anywhere on the Internet.
Well in informal testing, I've found that isn't always true with foreign ISPs. I remember several years ago when I worked for network operations on campus, I was testing with someone in Sweden, they were on a DSL service called BBB. 10mbit to the home, which at the time was pretty high end. However, they got crap connections to us, about 256kbit. Well, the problem wasn't on our end. I checked the routers, they were all fine, I checked the links, they were all low usage (below 20%), I tried transfers to a number of known high bandwidth sites in various places, all went fast.
A little playing around revealed that more or less BBB was a huge WAN, like we had on campus. They provided a high speed connection between you and them. So anyone else on the same ISP you got blazing fast speeds to. However they didn't have the bandwidth to support it to the rest of the Internet. So if you hopped off their network, things got much, MUCH slower.
So is your situation similar? It wouldn't surprise me if it was, because larger links cost lots and lots of money. It isn't a linear scale. While 100mbit gear is pretty cheap, if you have a bunch of people on 100mbit, you can't have a 100mbit uplink. If you do, that means that they'll only get their full rate if they are the only on using it. That don't mean you need dedicated bandwidth per person, but you do need more than what they each get. So while 100 people x 100mbit doesn't need a 10gbit uplink, you probably should have a 1gbit uplink, maybe more. Well the same thing is true at higher levels, and it starts to add up pretty quick to needing some real big links, if you are actually offering people that speed to the Internet.
Otherwise, you have a situation like we do on campus. I have a gig connection to my desktop at work. The switch it is connected to has a gig to our firewall, that has redundant gig to the building switch, which has redundant gig to the distribution switch, which has redundant gig to the core, which has redundant gig to the edge. However I wouldn't say I have a gig net connection. Why? Well two things:
1) At each of those levels, the connection is only a gig, but I am sharing with more people. Our building probably has 500 computers in it, the distribution switches it connects to probably handle 50 buildings, and the whole campus connects to the core switches. So while I could get a gig all the way to the core, I could only do it if I were the only one using it. In reality, I have to share with lots of other people.
2) We d
So, sign up for FiOS (Score:2)
That appears what Verizon wants you to do, rather than have to maintain that crappy old copper network. That crappy old regulated copper network.
As I understand it, Verizon (and others) lobbied and won concessions in the regulation of newer technology networks. If you request new service, supplied by FiOS, they can get you to agree to new terms of service. Terms of service much more to Verizon's liking, no doubt.
Verizon could work their way down the street and switch everyone to a FiOS line, even if on
No FIOS for me (Score:2)
What are you complaining about? (Score:2)
The conspiracy theories that they're trying to pull the copper to make it so you can't go with the competition have been soundly debunked. Why on earth would you want to stay with crappy old DSL when you could have rock-stable FiOS?
For some perspective, my internet uptime with FiOS is going on three years. Your DSL can't do that.
I doubt your neighbors are using the bandwidth (Score:2)
I would suspect the issue is like comcast here. They reduced everybody's 6 Mbps cable feeds to 1 Mbps because, as one tech told me, "nobody ever checks their speeds anyway." Another
Public Utilities Commission (Score:2, Informative)
You can complain to both the FCC and PUC(s) about your service.
While it may not be enough to improve your service right away, the telephone company MUST pay attention these complaints.
Uh..... (Score:2)
I think they are making him an offer he won't have a choice to refuse.