A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Verizon pre-emptively upgrading everyone’s FiOS speeds.

I am happy to report that the upgrade was completed on my account. It happened at about the same time that I tried out FiOS TV and Verizon’s voice over IP telephone service (VOIP). I decided to cancel both the television and the telephone, but I got to keep my new speeds:

Does it make a difference? It does when downloading files. There is an argument that upload speeds — past a certain point — are just for bragging rights. I don’t upload too much any more now that I have a job where I am on-site full time. However, I worked from home recently and it was certainly nice to have that upload speed for Internet telephony and file transfers.

I am glad that Verizon offered the upgrade. It’s good to have competition in this space between Verizon and Comcast (and a few others, like ClearWire). The consumer choice drives better product offerings at better prices.

I wrote late last month that Verizon is preemptively raising the upload and download speed of their fiber-to-the-home network. The changes were supposed to take place immediately, however I ran this test tonight and the results are very similar to my existing plan:

It looks like my upload speed is unchanged. The download speed has gone up, but the upload speed was supposed to be 15Mbps (optimal).

I am going to cancel my FiOS TV and FiOS VOIP tomorrow, so perhaps I’ll ask when the upgrade is expected.

Ten years ago I never thought I would be complaining about 23Mbps down :\

Verizon is boosting its FiOS fiber optic Internet service upload and download speeds today, according to this Ars Technica article. My plan, which is already 5Mbps up, 20Mbps down, will supposedly go to 15/25 … which is pretty damn awesome.

I immediately went to Speedtest.net to see if my line was upgraded, and so far it’s at the same speed it was yesterday:

I’ll check it again when I get home from work.

I’ve been a FiOS data customer for over three years, and have been very pleased. I recently got the FiOS TV and VOIP service, and while I pretty impressed with the TV picture quality the router they make me use sucks and my latency has been sporadic. I wish I could go back to using my hacked Linksys router.

I thought I was hot shit when I signed up for Verizon’s fiber optic Internet service over two years ago. I have the 5Mbps up, 20Mbps down speed for $55 a month. It has served me very well, and was only down once for any appreciable time, I believe for about eight hours. I ran Broadvoice’s voice over IP telephone service for almost three years, the first of which was on Comcast’s cable Internet service. The quality of service alone was worth Verizon’s slight price increase. I could send faxes over FiOS without difficulty and phone conversations were as clear as if I were talking on a landline.

Anyway, it is now possible for me to get 20Mbps up, 50Mbps down for $89 a month. That’s a pretty big jump in speed, especially on the upload side.

But do I need it?

I am not working from home any more, and I canceled my Broadvoice account a month ago. I download a fair amount of stuff, and play my Xbox 360 almost nightly and take advantage of the Live! online gaming service. However, are any of those experiences going to be sufficiently upgraded by going to 20/50? Or is it just geek bragging rights?

In the end, does it matter? 20/50! I remember when I used to think the T1 at my first computer job was blazing fast, and the line cost $1200 a month including the loop charge. My how things have changed in the last thirteen years.

I am up against an interesting problem here at work. They don’t allow access to instant messaging services, Web email, social networking sites, or gaming sites. It makes hard for me to take a mental break every once in awhile, and I have felt very disconnected from my online friends and previous co-workers.

I’ve explored ways to get around the network limitations. I purchased a new phone, the Verizon xv6900 (known elsewhere as the HTC Touch) to handle email. I can also sign onto AIM for instant messaging, but the lack of a hardware keyboard makes IMing kind of a pain in the ass.

There is an “unauthorized” open 802.11 wireless access point here at work. There are a few problems with using this full-time, however. One is that it is, well open. I trust in SSL to encrypt my traffic, but not everywhere I visit is behind the HTTPS protocol. The other drawback is that if I am on the open network I can’t get my work-related email, or be logged into our work-specific instant messaging system. I want to multi-home, and this isn’t possible with my current hardware setup.

There was also the option of using the phone as a wireless modem via Verizon’s high speed EVDO network. After fucking around with the phone and my work laptop off and on for a week, I finally got it working today.

Here are my speed and latency results.
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I called Verizon yesterday to see if something wonky had happened with my FIOS account. I was hoping that they’d put me down to the middle-speed account level by accident. It would have been the easy solution to my slow upload and download speeds. Unfortunately, my account was configured correctly. My call with tech support didn’t raise any immediate issues. The tech walked me through a TCP/IP optimization program (which didn’t do much, as I expected, but I was willing to give it a shot), and after that asked the dreaded, “are you sure it isn’t your router?” question.

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I was uploading and downloading some data last week and noticed that my upload speed was lower than it should be — like 1000+ kbps low. I tested my up/down speeds at speakeasy.net and Broadstar, only to find that I was getting, at best, 50% of the speeds I am paying for. I checked my bill online to see if I had been throttled down to the middle level FIOS service after my promotional month was up, but I’m still being charged for the 20Mbps/5Mbps line.

Fawk. Guess I’m going to have to call support on Wednesday to see what’s up. I hope it isn’t poor performance on the part of my Linksys router — the one that Verizon gave me would drop its connection every 30 – 50 minutes.

My days seem kinda boring after ordering FIOS; I don’t have to check the online availability page every twenty minutes like I used to. Luckily, Verizon has made up another fun mini-game for me to play, which is cleverly entitled “Document how frequently your FIOS connection drops.” Since I started keeping track on April 12, I’ve had nine outages. This is a big deal to me, since I work from home and also have a VOIP telephone used for work-related gibber jabber. I am waiting until I drop out of a WebEx I am hosting because my connection takes a dump.

The good news is the outages last for four minutes or less. The bad news is that there is no other apparently pattern to the outages. They have taken place at any time from 5:00AM all through the day and back around to 12:38AM. When I called Verizon to report the problem, I actually had an outage while I was waiting on hold with Verizon.

I have been holding off canceling my cable modem until the outages level off. Verizon has yet to provide me with an answer as to why my service sucks. The gentleman in the support center, of course, swore up and down that I was the only person he’d ever heard of with so many outages. I think what may actually be happening is that I’m one of the only customers who sit at their computers for 14 hours a day to notice :)

While Verizon is installing FIOS, I wanted to throw this up in preparation for my body fat caliper measurements tomorrow.

Wish me luck, both with the install and the pinching!

:post LJ-migration note:
This post originally contained a LiveJournal poll, which did not survive the transition to WordPress.

After over nine months of waiting in Virginia, and probably over a year on top of that in Rockville, I was giddy to see that FIOS was finally available at our address! I have compulsively checked the online availability page at least once day. That’s a lot of inquiries :)

My install date is Monday, April 10th. The wait will be worth it: I opted for 30Mbps down, 5Mbps up package for $54.99 a month. I chose the one-year commitment, so there is no installation fee (normally $70 if you go month-to-month). I am also saving $60 a year with the contract.

At last, beeyatches!