I recently switched to FiOS, and overall I’m very happy with the service. One piece of their implementation, though, may cause headaches to techies who want to configure their router.
OK, OK, this is a wireless and mobile blog, but, let’s face it, without good Internet access, all that wireless stuff is just a bunch of radios with no place to go. Indeed, having backhaul to the rest of the world is ultimately why we use wireless in the first place. So, anyway, after a couple of days earlier this week shivering in the dark due to the fragility of the local electric power grid (which I suspect is really a huge national problem just waiting to bite many more of us, and another excellent topic for discussion, but I digress), the FiOS installer arrived and, after pulling the fiber from the street, installing a big electronics box near my electric utility panel, a wireless router, a DVR, and two additional “set-top” boxes (which absolutely will not fit on top of the set; we desperately need a new term here), I’m up and running.
The TV picture quality, BTW, is everything they say it is – fabulous. It’s so much better than the Comcast service I previously had that there really is no comparison. While I don’t watch much television, the TV feature set is extensive to the point of being remarkable. Yes, I know that FiOS phone service can go dead during a power outage (they spec up to eight hours of backup power, though), but the UPSes powering my cordless phones will give out long before that, and I do have a cell phone that can be recharged over USB via a hand-cranked emergency lantern. Regardless, the 60-Hz.-hum-prone copper phone lines I previously paid a small fortune to Verizon every month for are now crystal-clear and much cheaper. The voice mail is much improved. And, getting to the point here, the 35 Mbps up/35 Mbps down Internet service works as advertised – a speedtest.net run just this morning yielded 10 ms. ping, 42.63 Mbps down, and 32.35 Mbps up. And I thought 12 down/3 up with Comcast was fast!
OK, here’s the issue. First, do not use the white Ethernet cable that comes with the router to link to your switch. It’s definitely non-standard. Use the yellow cable instead, and save yourself the hour I spent debugging that one. And, second, be aware that there are in fact two DHCP servers in the router. This is really, really outside the spec, but they apparently have one server for the “coax” side of the system, which connects to the set-top boxes, and one for us mere mortals on the “Ethernet” side. The coax server starts at 100 and this cannot be changed. Well, guess what: Farpoint Group’s IP address plan has always put dynamic addresses starting at 100, and statics below 100, so, well, the tech support guy was helpful if not apologetic. What looked like a serious bug is really just a funky, illegal implementation. I’m not sure why the STBs can’t use the same DHCP server as every other device.
But since everything else works so well, and since I always enjoy debugging networks, I’m going to cut Verizon some slack here. This problem won’t affect too many people out there, and the router otherwise has a whole bunch of useful features – it’s worth some time just poking around here via HTTP. And I don’t, BTW, use their wireless LAN capability at all, preferring to stick with my collection of APs, at least for now. I’ll get to testing their Wi-Fi at some point. In the meantime, though, and apart from the DHCP issue, I couldn’t be happier.
