Verizon's FIOS Internet

[Faydra]

So, yeah, fiber optic internet is available now in my neighborhood.

Anyone have any experience with this? Is it as yummy as it sounds?

[GodMark2]

So, yeah, fiber optic internet is available now in my neighborhood.

Anyone have any experience with this? Is it as yummy as it sounds?

You must be close to me. They just wired my apartment complex for that about a week or two ago. (Made me clean up my computer room so they could get into the closet with power tools).

I've used it at friends' places, and it's pretty yummy. But I don't know if they're using dedicated lines to each customer, of they're using a loop like cable. If it's the later, then speeds will probably plummet when everyone on the block joins up. Verizon never manages to actually say if the 5M line is a peak 5M, or a guaranteed 5M.

[Yalius]

It's dedicated, fiber connections can't be created as a loop. The company I work for is laying fiber to our members' homes now; I don't know what the actual speeds Verizon is offering, but I know that 100Mbps is doable, some of our test links are set for that; you really do get that for short-hop transfers. I can average about 85Mbps sustained transfers form one of the test loops to the office. Makes VPN and remote desktop run beautifully.

[GodMark2]

It's dedicated, fiber connections can't be created as a loop. The company I work for is laying fiber to our members' homes now; I don't know what the actual speeds Verizon is offering, but I know that 100Mbps is doable, some of our test links are set for that; you really do get that for short-hop transfers. I can average about 85Mbps sustained transfers form one of the test loops to the office. Makes VPN and remote desktop run beautifully.

No fiber in a loop? Tell that to the users of a SONET. It's ancient (by telcomm standards), but it works.

But that's not relevant. Whenever I have to talk to the 'technical support' for any network, the term 'loop' is often used in place of 'trunk' or 'bus'. That could just be the operators reading from a script written more by marketing than by engineering.

I know there's individual fibre to each house (or apartment in my case), but how do they connect those to the central office? How many houses per bus, how many buses? I know optical networks can use trunks/buses with routers (the one we just ran at the lab uses a trunk with FDM routers). So the question is: how many people do I share the trunk with?

Verizon is offering 5M down, 2M up for $40 (same as their 768K/128K DSL). They offer up to 30M/5M to residences (for $180), and probably better than that for offices. So, they won't even let us get 1/3 of your speed. Then again, it's still much faster than DSL.

But, with only 30M being offered as the top-tier, it looks like they're doing some bandwidth sharing, because 1G is doable with optical fiber (thought not easy). Now, how many people does that sharing top out at? 10: no problem, 1,000,000: problem. Even with 1,000,000, though, most use wouldn't be at the same time, so any individual transaction could be lightning fast compared to my pokey DSL.

[Yalius]

I'm probably not the best to answer those, then, our total number of fiber subscribers is only about 800, company-wide. We've got 144 subscribers max per drop, total of about 1.1 Gbps max load per drop, and using gigabit buses in the CO, until it reaches our main upstream line of 1Gbps. The only thing we come close to saturating is our upstream link, and that hasn't been saturated since it was upgraded from 455MBps to 1Gb.

Our packages are all either 6000/1000 or 8000/1500.

[Reality Believer]

So, yeah, fiber optic internet is available now in my neighborhood.

Anyone have any experience with this? Is it as yummy as it sounds?

I have FIOS, the 15 down, 2 up package. It is very sweet. The total available bandwidth is huge because they also offer TV and telephone across the same connection, so it is limited by your selection of service.

When I download something from a good server that can max out my connection, the progress box that pops up shows 1500 KB/sec. I just ran a DSL reports speed test and the results were 14744 Kb/s down and 1741 Kb/s up. Note the difference in units when looking test results. There is a difference in KB/s, Kb/s, and Mb/s.

One thing I have noticed is that many servers can't serve content fast enough to max out the connection. Google Earth, for example still seems somewhat slow compared to when I was on DSL. You Tube videos are throttled back, and JREF also seems to lag. Not much you can do about that.

Downloading huge files is a breeze though. I can stack up 4, 13mb files from a radio program that I listen to, and they all come down in about 15 seconds.

Highly recommended!

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

And the kid in the TV ads is damn cute, too.

~~ Paul

[illogical]

One thing I have noticed is that many servers can't serve content fast enough to max out the connection.

i'd agree. i had a VPS on a shared T3 and hit about 6 mbps max from many sites. GetRight uses mirrors in an attempt to "thread" the download.