Verizon FIOS Installation - lots of free equipment

When the Verizon FIOS sales van stopped on my street and started spewing pushy sales reps like a VW beetle spewing clowns in the center ring, I knew it meant that the last mile fiber build out had reached my neighborhood. I'm a serious telecommuter needing serious high speed Internet and the idea of fiber was pretty appealing. But my wife was the real instigator - being sensitive to the price as she handles all of the family finances. Our former provider was Comcast and we paid almost $100 per month for high speed Internet (I was satisfied with their service), and a very basic cable TV package. The Verizon rep gave a compelling sales pitch, the punch line of which was about $70 per month for 15/2 high speed Internet, plus digital standard def TV.

Being frugal folks, we took the bait and signed up, thinking some guy in India would enter a few IOS commands into a router somewhere and we would be done - nothing could be farther from the truth. The two most feared words in the phone company lexicon are "Truck Roll". Installing FIOS takes two. First, a tech showed up in a bucket truck to run the fiber from the poll to our house. This part is transparent to the user, other than the truck sitting outside the house for an hour. My guess is that a bucket truck roll is something like $100 per hour, but I don't really know (comments?).

The bucket truck was the easy part. Next, a different tech showed up in a van to set up the system. How Verizon expects positive ROI on this, I have no idea, but they are a lot smarter than me. First, there is a box on the outside of the house that appears to be a bridge from the optical network to something running over coax (probably DOCSIS) - see picture 1. Next, there is a box on the inside of the house that appears to be strictly for digital phone (which we did not order) and appears to contain a battery backup - see picture 2. Then, a big-ass cable modem / wireless access point /router - see picture 3, and finally 2 x set top boxes - see picture 4 (under the XBOX).

The second tech was at our house for approximately 6 hours, fishing coax and Cat5 around the house and being baffled by our Vonage router (a story for another post). In spite of his confusion, the system worked more-or-less by the time he left, minus the Vonage and a setup program to be run on our PC.

The Digital TV quality is very good (although I currently only have standard def TVs). There are more channels than Comcast for less money, although those channels require rental of the set top box for each TV. I have a third set that is connected directly to the analog coax, and the channel selection there is much less than with Comcast, but I don't care. I was not impressed with the onsite tech, but the phone help was excellent. The hold time was very short and the problems were resolved quickly.

My actual download speed appears to be about 4.8Mbps using PC pitstop. This is suspiciously close to the 5Mbps option. This may be a limitation of the site, but I will have to look into it. I can't test the upload speed easily due to firewall issues, but I haven't made a serious attempt.

I don't have any real complaints, other than that I may be paying for 15M and getting only 5M. It would be nice to get a few more analog channels, but I'm still getting more for less, and happy to see the cable company monopoly crumbling at last.