a short note on FiOS

I have not had a long experience with FiOS but I already have some experience with it. This morning I experienced my first extended outage with the service and I have something to share with you. 

When my service came back up after the technician reset the optical network terminal*, the service was very shaky to start with. For a 15 mbps down and 5 mbps up, 4.96 mbps sounds good but the 6.50 mbps down is not so much fun. The service went down and I power cycled the router and ONT. I got on the phone with Verizon (call them at 1.800.553.1555) on the issue and by the time I was on the phone with a support representative who was actually able to help me**, the router had an amber light and I had hope again. The rep advised me that while actual throughput will be less than the connection speed, it should not stay too low for too long.

After I put down the phone, I got back on the computer and tried the speed test again. Result? 15.57 Mbps down and 5.34 Mbps which sounded a whole lot better. I ran the test a few more times and although the results showed some variance, it was not as bad as the first picture suggests. The bottom line is actually pretty simple: 

If your service goes down, it may take some time for things to stabilize.

* and other things on the network side that he did not talk to me about as it seems telling customers that your network is fallible to simple human errors — like a tech tripping over a cable or pulling the wrong cable out in the early morning shift — has a tendency to scare customers away. 

** because I call from a cell phone with a 903 area code which is East Texas, Verizon likes to save me time and effort by forwarding me to the call center for Texas. This does not really help because the service is in New Jersey. At times, it feels that the call routing could be made faster and more streamlined that it is with the current automated voice response system.

*** As I was writing this post, I ran the test a couple more times and here are the results. All tests for this post reference the New York, NY servers of Speak Easy.

14.46/5.19

8.27/4.60

16.33/5.23

12.75/5.25