FWIW-
I signed up for Verizon's Business
Fios (fiber optic broadband) service a couple of weeks ago, and they
installed it last week.
<rant>
Now let me start by saying that
if I can buy the equivalent service for ANYTHING from anybody BUT
Verizon, I do it. Overall, their customer service stinks. I was an early adopter of Vonage, just to get
away from Verizon's phone service. And my company was a victim of
Verizon's hideous network design in hurricane Floyd, during which I
never lost connectivity but I could not move a packet because their billing
center drowned.
</rant>
So when the consumer Fios advertising
blurb arrived a couple of months ago, announcing megabits of connectivity
for under $100/month, I was skeptical. I reviewed the TOS and found that
they specifically prohibit servers of any kind, and will not provide static
IPs. That killed the service for me, because I run a couple of backup
servers at home and I need the static IPs. There were other problems, but
the no-server and no-fixed IP policies were deal breakers. I called and
asked about a business grade service, and was told on no uncertain terms
that business Fios was a concept, but it was at least three years away from
implementation.
But a friend of mine down the street
called around and found a Verizon person who was empowered to create Fios
business accounts. I called her and got a static block of five IPs with
15mbps download and 2mbps upload. Straight pipe, no port blocking, no SMTP
"you gotta host with us" BS.
<rave>
The order process was very easy, and
the order taker was great. She wanted to be sure she understood what I
needed, and she needed to be sure that there was a good match between my
needs and their offering.
The installer was gracious from the start to the end, even to the
point of asking me for a brush so he could clean the snow off his shoes
before he entered the house. I could not ask for a better installer. He
spent four hours setting up the physical stuff, but he had only done
non-business installs before. Not surprising, since they are still not
promoting Fios as a business service. I spent two minutes setting up
the router for a static IP, another two showing him how to do it, and about
ten to fifteen minutes explaining the difference between dynamic and static
IPs and the like. (The installer's lack of experience was the only negative
I can point to, and I expected it since Fios is primarily a home
service.)
I am not easily impressed, but I have
only one word to describe this service: WOW!
I am getting 15+mbps consistently
from test sites. My VPN to the data center runs almost as fast as my LAN
here at home. My backup mail server
is running without a hitch, as is my backup DNS. I have had zero downtime
since the service was installed, unlike my Covad DSL service which had
downtime several times a week.
</rave>
Anyway, sorry for the length of this,
but I thought it would be interesting to all to see where the telcos are
going for broadband. Their future clearly is fiber, and so far it looks
really, really good, at least at Verizon.
-Dave Doherty
Skywaves, Inc.