Verizon Offers 20/20 Symmetrical FiOS Service 375
BlueMerle writes with news that Verizon is offering 20 Mbps symmetrical service for current FiOS customers in NY, CT, and NJ. It will cost $65 a month. Cable companies aren't in a position to match this capability.
Cable Companies can match or exceed this in 2008 (Score:5, Informative)
While the throughput is shared, there's something to be said about PowerBoost as well - they may be able to offer a 20/20 service with boost capability up to 40/40 or 80/40... or if you pay to download movie they may allow you to download that movie @ the full 200 Mbit/s.
Cable companies will be able to compete - but only if they don't keep shooting themselves in the foot with things like BitTorrent filtering.
Re:Verizon FIOS customers in other parts of countr (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Verizon FIOS customers in other parts of countr (Score:2, Informative)
My connection costs... just shy of 500 dkk/month for 20/20. That's around 100$. Granted, I opted for 10/10 at half that price, because I honestly don't need 20/20 - and that's even though my boss is paying my ISP fees (and he would gladly up it if I asked him)
(Før du spørger: Det er gennem min boligforening
Benchmark data (Score:5, Informative)
The question somebody asked, directly or unspoken, in this forum is: do you really get all that speed? In my case the answer is yes. I FTP at 1000 kB/s (kilobytes) with the other guys in the Fastweb network and it's common to download files at more than 400 kB/s from US servers. CDNs usually bring that figure in the 700-900 kB/s range. That bandwidth isn't guaranteed by the contract but it never shrunk noticeably in these eight years, despite the fact that the customer base grew 100 times or more. On the other side, none of the 10 or 20 Mb/s ADSL connections I saw here in Italy (with other ISPs) were faster than one tenth of their nominal bandwidth, when downloading files from the same services I use.
So, if you trust your provider to invest in its interconnection with the Internet at large, those 65$ can be worth the expense. If you think that it will somewhat cap your bandwidth, stay with what you have. In my case I got a six-months-for-free offer and I jumped in at the very beginning of the offering
Finally, do you really need all that speed? My answer is yes: you find a way to put it at use once you got it and you don't want to go back.
Re:No love for Socal? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cable Companies can match or exceed this in 200 (Score:2, Informative)
I had read that the real bottleneck in the DOCSIS system was the total bandwidth allocated to upstream traffic on each coax system. Apparently it has to be a separate band to keep from interfering with downstream television and data.
If true, the cable operators will have to keep deploying more fiber nodes to break the coax network into smaller and smaller pieces to be able to compete. Eventually they might have to run fiber to each house...?
20 Mbits is fine, but the backbone needs updating (Score:4, Informative)
Speed test in Korea: 94.7Mb down - 11.4Mb up
Speed test to Japan: 11.4Mb down - 7.8Mb up
Speed test to USA: 2.7Mb down - 0.9Mb up
My DSL in the US is working at ~630Kb up (have ATT which promises between 512Kb - 764Kb up). So even if I upgraded the service, my slingbox would barely perform better.....
Re:No love for Socal? (Score:4, Informative)
-Mike
no servers, period (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Decisions, decisions.... (Score:2, Informative)
A good site to check if fios is available in your area is http://www.fiberexperts.com/ [fiberexperts.com]. However, I don't know if it's up to date.
Re:Cable Companies can match or exceed this in 200 (Score:5, Informative)
DOCSIS 3.0 has only been out for less than a year. Cable modem networks have significantly less upstream bandwidth than downstream bandwidth -- analog tv is to blame for this.
I'd rather have FiOS anyways; I drool over a symmetrical connection.
And yes, IACMT (cable modem technician) (though not a field tech).
Now If Only They Weren't Dicks (Score:3, Informative)
I would jump on this in a second (FIOS is available in my area) if only it were a true internet connection offered by a real ISP. But (at least if this is a residential plan) if you look at the TOS you will see that it contains weasel words that you can get kicked for, you know, actually using the bandwidth you're ostensibly buying or for running any type of "server", which is really not clearly defined and certainly could include P2P apps (like maybe Skype). So, when you think about it, what you're getting is not really a true internet connection but some limited internet service package that only allows you to do a certain (ill-defined) subset of what can be done with an internet connection.
Finally, in my experience with Verizon (as a phone company) they treat their customers like dirt and their techs are incompetent. At one point they even screwed up our phones then came back to fix that and screwed it up worse. Eventually we had to draw them a damned diagram of how to do it correctly. I also talked to one of the FIOS guys at a kiosk they had in the mall. He couldn't give a straight answer about whether they do traffic shaping, have data transfer caps, or block certain protocols. As a test, I asked him about running a server on a residential connection, and he lied to me and told me it's permitted, which is directly contradicted by the TOS.
I'd love to get a cable or fiber connection that's much faster than my current DSL, if only there were a provider I could tolerate giving my money to.
5Mbps down / 2Mbps up, great service, great price (Score:2, Informative)
For the DSL service from 2000 to 2005 and the FiOS since 2005 I've paid between $30 and $35 per month. I live near Dallas, Texas, USA. Because I'm able to download, through BitTorrent, so much good material over the internet (mainly British television shows) I haven't needed any kind of cable TV service.
I'm happy!
Re:Heh (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Decisions, decisions.... (Score:3, Informative)
(If you also have FIOS tv then you need to keep the actiontech around, but it can be behind your other router)
As a consumer, only one FiOS drop thus far (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know about others but in my experience the number of problems with my consumer-grade FiOS is minimal. I've had FiOS 15/2 for about a year now, and I've only experienced one drop where I lost both Internet and voice. I called to report the issue via my cell phone and was told, after a few minutes of investigating, that there was indeed a local outage and that they're working on it. About four hours later I was back up. This was on a weekend afternoon, so it's not like it was a matter of life or death, like some people make it out to be.
My only gripe when that happens is that Verizon does not give you any dial-up time with consumer FiOS. You might think, "Well, duh, how can you call when your phone line is down, too?" but I have a data cable for my cell phone, which can act as a modem. When I had their DSL, I also had 50 hours of dial-up per month. So, if DSL went down I could still use my Verizon account to access the Internet through dial-up. With FiOS Verizon doesn't allow that because FiOS and DSL/dial-up are considered to be different business entities from what I understand.
But overall I'm very satisfied with my FiOS connection and my uptime has been well over 99% during "normal" hours with me using it heavily at night and my wife using it throughout the day.
Upgraded this morning. Speed test results (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ummmm... to run a little web server. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yeah but what's the service level? (Score:3, Informative)
I got stealthcapped too for accidentally running BT uncapped for only a day or so.
RoadRunner only has a 512k per-user upstream cap and 5M downstream cap, but doesn't seem to care if you saturate it.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)