The Tale of the Five Hour FiOS Installation…

So we’ve finally done upgrading from cable to FiOS, but boy, was it certainly a series of unexpected challenges right up until the very end!

And for what it’s worth, the Verizon tech(s) handling my install were actually pretty great about the whole thing – he made a point to stay until every last problem was solved, which was very much appreciated because one of my biggest fears was them getting it half installed and then saying they’d need to come back another day, and have me get lost in scheduling hell, and so forth…

But that didn’t happen, and I’m very much grateful for it! 🙂

Anyways, so the “challenges” that we saw:

• First, he found that the fiber line running from the street to our house had been cut. Luckily, they had another tech out within 30 minutes to get the line replaced.
• Then there was some bad wiring throughout our house that was preventing the cable boxes from communicating with the router. Apparently a separate line up in the attic had been run dedicated for the office where the router sits, so it had no way to communicate with everything else.
• In the meantime, he also ended up replacing all of the Verizon hardware inside and outside our garage before finding the true problem. He thought that we could just use what was already there from a previous tenant, but replaced it anyways as part of the troubleshooting.
• And then probably the most bizarre of all, we lastly discovered that the router was also receiving interference from the cordless phone sitting next to it! It was enough to cause problems with the on-demand features on the TVs, but was easy enough to fix by switching the channel used by the wi-fi in the router to a set channel instead of letting it choose automatically. Weird…

Yeah – it was a long process and I was definitely getting a little nervous at times, but at least it’s done now and so far there seems to be a decent improvement! Below are a couple of speed tests I did with the web host where all of my sites call home – nice to see that the uploads should be going a little quicker in the future…  😉

Admittedly I was a little dismayed that I’ve yet to see the true 25/25 Mbps that the package I chose boasted (I think my old package with Bright House was 15/2). The tech gave me the typical line of “It’s marketing – that’s why they say speeds up to 25 Mbps…” which I still think is a lame excuse, but whatever. And I understand that speeds are going to fluctuate throughout the day, and that the farther away the servers are, the lower speeds will be … either way, as long as it doesn’t consistently drop every 24-48 hours at random like cable was doing for us, that’s still a huge step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned.

As for the TV, I really haven’t had much chance to play around with it yet, but I did just help my wife setup Verizon’s Mobile Remote app on her phone, which so far seems pretty slick because it will actually let you use your iPhone as a remote control! I was pretty impressed that there’s really no lag or anything at all – I had the regular remote in one hand and my phone in the other, and the box responded equally fast from either one, so that’s kinda neat. Don’t know how much we’ll actually use it, but neat nonetheless … and I like how their mobile app schedules things via the DVR a lot cleaner than cable offered, too.

I’ll probably write a separate post sometime later when I’ve really had a chance to dive into all of the new cable offerings, but in the meantime as long as the Internet connectivity is more reliable – and also a bit faster, and cheaper – then really that’s good enough for me. All that’s left right now is for me to return all of this crap to Bright House tomorrow…

Curious to see if they have anything to say in response to me canceling after having been a loyal customer for over 9 years, but then again, if they couldn’t be implored to offer me a slightly better rate when I called a few weeks ago to say I was thinking of switching yet again, then maybe they don’t deserve my business anyways!  🙄

Hope Verizon lives up to my expectations, but so far, so good…