After living with Verizon’s 5Mbps, fiber-based FiOS Internet access service for several months, I decided to pay the extra $10 per month and ratchet up the speed to 15Mbps to see if I noticed an appreciable difference.
My assumption was that the gain would be marginal because, with anything faster than 5Mbps, the choke point wouldn’t be access, it would be the efficiency of the remote server or possibly Internet congestion.
With the fiber terminated at the optical network terminal on the side of my house, a simple call was all it took to up the speed. Verizon said it would go into effect that night.
In the FiOS architecture, Verizon delivers three wavelengths of light to each house: an 860-MHz video channel (which in my case is not active yet); a 622Mbps channel for voice, data and video on demand; and a 155Mbps return channel for voice and data. The 622M and 155Mbps channels are shared by as many as 32 households.
Although everything seemed to load a little more promptly when I surfed around the Web that night, the experience with 15Mbps wasn’t astoundingly different.
To verify that Verizon had indeed made the service change, I tried Verizon’s online speed test, and it showed I was getting only 8.5Mbps. So yes, the upgrade had gone through, but the speed was half of what I was expecting.
But I got better results when I tried the Speakeasy Speed Test at www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/. When communicating with servers in eastern cities – New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta and Chicago – I was reliably getting 13.9M to 14.9Mbps download speeds and 1.7Mbps upload speeds. Those speeds dropped precipitously, however, when I hit test servers on the other side of the country, with results ranging from 4.8Mbps for Seattle to 1.7Mbps for Los Angeles.
The latter findings seemed to confirm my theory that access above 5Mbps might be wasted at least part of the time because the Internet simply isn’t capable of living up to these higher-speed access capabilities. Anecdotally, however, the 15Mbps pipe makes general Web usage more enjoyable, and the benefit seems most evident when viewing any Web-based video content.
The longer-term benefit of FiOS is as an alternative to cable TV. Verizon is gambling big on fiber because it believes it can use it to capture a good chunk of the entertainment business. Although the company only has approval to offer TV services in three markets, it recently announced support for “one-touch, on demand access to real-time local weather and traffic information.” Future enhancements will let customers personalize news and weather pages.
Very high-speed Internet access and enhanced cable TV features might add up to a win for Verizon.
