It’s FIOS Time
The past month or two has been interesting for my home network from a technology standpoint. I have a server that went down because of a motherboard issue; I need some new drive rails to bring my Windows 2008 server online; my cable service from Comcast went out for a couple days; and I finally made the jump to Verizon FIOS.
It’s only been 4 days since I had the service installed, and it took all day to get it up and running, due to your typical service provider provisioning issues (you know, where you ask for X, Y and Z, and they give you W and Y, and in trying to fix it, break Y before getting it right several hours later. Yeah, that), so I don’t have a great deal to report on as it relates to the service.
I will say, that so far, picture quality is very good except for the few, free View on Demand shows we looked (I’ll render a full verdict once we’ve seen one of the paid shows), and the price is right. I have to play around with the Internet portion a bit more as well. Verizon provides a wireless router for the service that has some pretty good features, in terms of firewall configuration, but some of the defaults are rather silly (i.e. 64-bit WEP). I already changed that to WPA2, and adjusted some of the other feeble defaults. At least they give me full control over the configuration.
They also provide the ability to purchase static IPs, which I might have to buy, so that I can restore my site-to-site VPN configuration. (Right now, I’m NAT’d behind their device, so I can’t configure my VPN tunnels).
Picture quality is better than with Comcast Cable, especially for HD channels. The default package of channels is also better with FiOS. By the end of next week, I’ll be able to make a better comparison across all services.
I stuck with Comcast for quite a while, but they had too many service issues, especially on the Internet side. OTOH, their cable modems gave me a public IP, which made things a lot easier for me, but I’ll call Verizon this week and see what my options are, now that the service is running properly.
In order to get the pricing bundle, we took the VoIP service from Verizon as well, which I would have preferred not to do. I like having my phone service distinct from the other services, and I’ve been extremely satisfied with Packet8.net for almost 5 years (since Jan 2004). I’m not going to get rid of Packet8, but I will scale back the service, since there’s no point in paying double. Again, I’ll have a better idea on how good Verizon is in this department by the end of the month.
Let’s see how it goes.
About Logik!
Andrew S. Baker aka ASB aka Logik!
Andrew is an accomplished, hands-on IT Executive with a solid track record of providing timely and cost-effective business solutions using technology. With over 16 years experience in Information Technology, he has proven to be effective both as a Team Leader and as an individual contributor in designing, deploying, securing and maintaining enterprise networks.
His personal interests include Astronomy, Basketball, Bible Study, Chess, Comics, Computers,
Family Life Ministries, Reading and Strategy/Role Playing games...
Some of his contributions include several whitepapers on technology and Information Security, the UltraTech Knowledgebase, various postings to technology mailing lists and forums, active participation on LinkedIn Answers, along with a number of interviews for articles published in industry magazines.
A condensed version of
Andrew's current resume is available here.