Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:37:00 GMT
The Verizon FiOS installers have been circling the neighborhood lately, tearing up sidewalks, digging holes in lawns, and (finally) pulling fiber down the telephone poles in the direction of the nearest CO. According to their call center, they’ll probably be able to upgrade me from 3/768 DSL to 15/15 fiber sometime around the middle of next month. I’ve been waiting for years for them to finally make it to my place, so I’ll probably have to have a party or something :-).
Just for the fun of it, I was reading Verizon’s business FiOS system requirements page. Here’s a snippet:
| Speed | Recommended CPU speed | Recommended FSB speed | Recommended free disk space |
|---|
| 5/2 Mbps | 600 MHz | 100 MHz | 128 MB |
| 5/5 Mbps | 733 MHz | 133 MHz | 200 MB |
| 50/10 Mbps | 2 GHz | 330 MHz | 500 MB |
So, not only do I need a faster CPU to enjoy a faster connection, I also need additional free disk space? Huh. Who knew?
Tags fios, verizon | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 30 Jun 2006 22:29:11 GMT
I just saw a press release that claims that Verizon has started turning up FiOS customers in my neighborhood. I don’t think they’re in my neighborhood quite yet (although there’s been a lot of Verizon work a couple blocks away), but it’s getting closer.
I wouldn’t say no to an extra 3-5x bandwidth for the same price.
Tags bothell, dsl, fios, network, verizon | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 27 Jul 2005 04:07:57 GMT
I was complaining to someone yesterday about my DSL bill, since I’m paying $80/month for 1.5/384 service. Out of curiosity, I took a look on Verizon’s business DSL website and noticed that they don’t sell 1.5/384 in my area anymore; the default is now 3.0/768 for the same price as before. So I called them up this morning and they’re doubling my line speed for free. It’ll take a day or two before it takes effect, but in a day or two I’ll either be:
- Happy with my new, fast service.
- Yelling at Verizon for completely screwing up my upgrade and knocking me off the net.
Anyone want to take bets on which one it’ll be?
Update: Well, I got my answer. I found this in the logs this morning:
Jul 27 00:22:35 guam kernel: wanpipe1: ADSL starting training 0x2 ...
Jul 27 00:22:35 guam kernel: wanpipe1: GP_LINK_DOWN, Training State
Jul 27 00:22:51 guam kernel: wanpipe1: Cell Delination successful
Jul 27 00:22:51 guam kernel: wanpipe1: GP_LINK_UP, State Trained
Jul 27 00:22:51 guam kernel: wanpipe1: ADSL Link connected (Down 3360 kbps, Up 704 kbps)
Jul 27 00:22:59 guam kernel: wanpipe1: Link connected!
There was also a “congratulations on your upgrade” email in my inbox. So it looks like the speed upgrade went through without a hitch. I have to say, this is the first really nice experience I’ve had with Verizon DSL in years. I’m feeling a lot better about them then I used to–six months ago I was getting 768/128, now I’m getting 3.0/768 for the same price. I’m not feeling ripped-off any more.
A quick download test verifies that the speed really is faster–I’m getting 298 KB/sec from ftp-mirror.internap.com. Smokeping shows that my link’s lower-bound latency dropped overnight, and this morning’s latency graph is much less noisy then it was yesterday. Both of those are good for VoIP.
Update: I did a quick comparison with my old speeds. I was getting 1792/442, now I’m getting 3360/704. That’s an 88% increase in downloads and a 59% increase in uploads. Not quite the 2x boost that you’d expect, but still quite nice.
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags business, dsl, speed, upgrade, verizon | 11 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 10 May 2005 23:58:37 GMT
Verizon’s doing weird things with my home phone again. At the moment, I’m paying for call forwarding on my home line, so any time someone calls my home number, the call is forwarded to my NuFone VoIP account. This was working just fine, but I’ve received busy signals when calling home twice in the last week. Since I’m able to call home via NuFone directly without any problems, I’m assuming that the problem is on Verizon’s end.
It’s taken a bit of poking around, but I think I’ve figured out what’s happening–Verizon will only forward one call at a time. If a second caller calls while a forwarded call is in progress, then the second caller will receive a busy signal. That’s a really nasty behavior–I’ve effectively lost the ability to do call waiting and to take voicemail messasges while I’m on the phone.
Since this is clearly happening on Verizon’s end, I called their local repair line and talked to someone. In the past, I’ve had much better luck with their repair number then their sales number–the repair people have access to the switch–but this time the agent was terminally confused by this–she got mixed up and thought that I was forwarding my calls to my cell phone, and concluded that it was the cell provider’s problem. Once she got into that state, I couldn’t figure out how to un-confuse her, so I guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow and try to get a new repair tech.
I guess I should see this as an incentive to find someplace that do a LNP port of my home number to a cheap-ish VoIP service. It looks like Teliax might be able to do it, and most people on the Asterisk-Users list seem to think highly of them.
Posted in Asterisk | Tags callforwarding, nufone, teliax, verizon, voip | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 10 Feb 2005 05:08:58 GMT
I can’t believe it. After months and months of trying to upgrade my DSL, everything is finally up and running on my new DSL line. The line wasn’t supposed to go live until Friday evening, but Verizon sent me mail today with my IP address and claimed that it’s up and running. And, indeed, it is.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite as prepared as I thought I was; I’d forgotten to change the DNS TTL on scottstuff.net, so people may have a hard time getting through to this site for a couple days. Oops. Other then that, though, everything seems to be up and running perfectly. The sample size is still kind of small, but smokeping suggests that my average ping time has improved drastically–I was seeing numbers from 25 to 800 ms before. Right now, the line looks flat at 30 ms. That’ll probably break a bit once traffic picks back up on the website, but I should be able to keep it under 100 ms, easy.
I’ll post more details later tonight or tomorrow, along with a review of the Sangoma S518 PCI ADSL card. I have to put the kids to bed first, though.
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags dsl, home, networking, verizon | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 03 Feb 2005 00:36:10 GMT
My DSL upgrade saga took another step towards completion today, when Verizon installed a new phone line at home. Amazingly enough, it’s already in their DSL database, and Verizon’s DSL sales website allowed me to order DSL. I don’t have an install date for the DSL service yet, but I’m two steps closer to the finish line.
I was surprised that Verizon’s business DSL department gives you a choice of buying a new DSL modem ($99) or providing your own. I took the opportunity to order a Sangoma S518 PCI DSL card instead of an external box. Supposedly, their Linux drivers are solid (Sangoma has been involved with Linux practically forever), and there are a couple big advantages to native DSL interfaces, rather then DSL-to-Ethernet bridges. The biggest advantage is buffering–right now, my DSL modem has at least a couple seconds worth of buffers on it. If I send outbound traffic as fast as I can, I rapidly get to the point where nothing makes it out in under 2 seconds. So, even if I use extreme care in setting up QoS prioritization rules for VoIP traffic, the VoIP packets will still end up stuck in the DSL modem’s buffers. To combat this, I’ve been forced to rate-limit my outbound traffic to about 75% of the theoretical limit; even then it can really suck at times. Several people on Asterisk mailing lists have commented that their S518 has really made their VoIP performance shine.
In addition, since the S518 is directly talking to the phone company, it can tell exactly what speed I’m currently provisioned at and can log problems via syslog. My current nasty DSL box can’t do anything but blink lights at me when there’s a problem.
All in all, it looks like a decent improvement, especially since it’s only $115 or so online.
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags dsl, home, verizon | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Sat, 22 Jan 2005 16:22:18 GMT
I feel like I’m finally entering the third act of my DSL upgrade drama. This started over a year ago when I realized that I really wanted faster service then the 768/128 link that I’m paying $80/month for right now. Last June, I asked Verizon to turn up my DSL’s speed, with predictable results–they ran around in circles for over a month, with different departments giving me different answers, ranging from “we already turned it up” to “we lost the order” to “we can’t do that, you need to cancel DSL, wait for it to go dead, and then re-order.”
Amazingly enough, the “you need to cancel” camp was correct–Verizon is unable to increase the speed of my current DSL setup. I played as many cards as I could, pulled the few strings that I have inside of Verizon, had off-the-record conversations with installers, and concluded that I had three choices:
- Put up with my current service, as slow and expensive as it it.
- Cancel DSL, wait two weeks, and re-order.
- Order a second phone line, wait for them to install it, then order DSL on it, then cancel the old line and DSL.
I looked into cable modems, but there’s no way to get a static IP address out of Comcast around here, and I need to run a number of servers. I considered moving my mail, web, and Asterisk servers off onto a hosted system somewhere–that’d let me use Comcast with a dynamic IP, but the cost and complexity of it all just makes it impractical.
So, yesterday, I finally decided to go with plan #3. I ordered a new phone line. It ends up costing me $29 to get it installed and $20/month. Hopefully I won’t have to carry both lines for more then a month. It’s supposed to be up on February 2nd; as soon as that happens, I’m ordering new 1.5/384 DSL service on the line. I’ll cancel the old DSL the same day that the new one comes up–I just need to swing DNS over to the new IP and then wait for a few short timeouts. So, hopefully, this whole saga won’t cost me more then $100 up front. The nice thing is that it’ll end up saving me a few bucks in the long term–with 3x the upstream bandwidth, I can move more phone services over to VoIP, so I can turn off more features on the phone line. That could save me almost $10/month. It’s not a lot of money, but every bit helps sometimes. Besides, it’s mostly the principle of the thing.
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags dsl, home, upgrade, verizon | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Sat, 07 Aug 2004 00:17:52 GMT
Chapter 3 in my continuing DSL upgrade saga. Chapter 2 saw our intrepid hero trapped in bureaucratic hell, unable to move forward to a higher speed without canceling the current service and waiting for Verizon to re-install the new service. Since I wasn’t looking forward to 2 weeks without service, I decided to wait a while before cancelling my service.
Silly me. I assumed that, because they’d cancelled the upgrade, they wouldn’t keep billing me for the new service. No such luck; my bill has been $10 higher then it should have been for the last three months. I called once before and they claimed that they’d fixed it, but my bills haven’t reflected any change. So I called again, and was informed that I’m stuck with the new rate. Since they no longer offer my old rate, they can’t give it back to me. Typical Verizon. I was starting to warm up my “can I speak to a supervisor” speech when the rep surprised me and offered a credit for a month’s free service. After doing a bit of bit of quick math, as long as I cancel my current service within the next 5 months, I come out ahead with the credit. So, I now have a deadline running–cancel my current frame-relay-based DSL service before the end of the year, or end up paying extra for service that I’m not receiving.
Hmm. If they charge me for a new DSL modem, I wonder if I’m better off returning it for credit and getting a Sangoma S518 instead. A couple people on the asterisk-users mailing list have had really good luck with it, because it lets you do more reliable traffic shaping on your Linux box, rather then play games with the buffers on the DSL modem. It’s probably not worth the hassle, though.
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags dsl, home, verizon | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 18 Jun 2004 21:38:58 GMT
The Verizon DSL saga came to the end of a chapter today. I spent way too much time sitting on hold (although at least I can get work done that way), and concluded that:
- Verizon is way too big, and provisioning, billing, and tech support don’t talk to each other.
- They don’t care about making customers happy.
- They can’t upgrade my DSL without 2-3 weeks of downtime.
Ugh. As suggested last night, I have a “legacy” frame-relay DSL setup. They’re deploying ATM-based DSL now. In order to upgrade, I need to switch services.
Technically, this is easy–ship me a new modem, swing my line from the old DSLAM to the new one, and update a couple database entries. Unfortunately, they don’t work that way. They don’t have a button for “rebuild link” in their order-entry system. Just “delete” and “add.” And there’s at least a 2-week gap in between the two.
You know, if they had competition, then they wouldn’t act like this. Oh, wait–they *do* have competition–I could go with Covad or Comcast. Except, Verizon seems to be lying to Covad about my wiring or something, either that or routing my wires in weird ways. I’m wired into the BOTHWAXB CO, apparently. According to Verizon, I’m 7800 feet from the CO. According to the database that they give to Covad, I’m over 30,000 feet from SWLLKWAXA. Uh, yeah, guys. Whatever. If the numbers that Washington’s PUC puts out are valid, I’m wired into the single largest CO in the state, and I’d really expect Covad to have a presence there.
So, at this point, I have three things to try. First, I have a friend who was, until recently, one of the DSL installers for Verizon in my area. He’s now working at a desk for them, but he can probably get me in touch with someone that can make things go smoother. Second, I’m going to talk to Covad again, and see if they can explain the database issue. Third, I’m going to talk to the PUC (er, “UTC” in Washington, apparently).
You know, who’d have guessed that it’d be this hard to give people more money?
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags broken, dsl, verizon | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 11 Jun 2004 21:16:28 GMT
So, I’ve been trying to upgrade my DSL at home for over two weeks now. Verizon has switched packages, and I can go from 768/128 to 1500/384 for $10/month. Since I’m currently limited by the uplink speed for a lot of things (VoIP, SSH from work, web serving), this is basically a 3x speed upgrade. My line supports it, my hardware supports it, and I’m only 7800 feet from the CO.
Easy upgrade, right?
Oh, wait. I said Verizon, didn’t I?
So far, nothing has happened. I’ve spent over 90 minutes on the phone with Verizon people. No one can quite explain why I haven’t been upgraded. The first one thought it should happen in 24-48 hours. Monday’s answer was 2-3 days. Today’s first offer was “5 days or so,” but after escalating and sitting on hold for most of an hour (frankly, the only thing that office speakerphones are really good for), they’re claiming that it should be up later today. Which is good, since they’ve been billing me for the higher speed since the first.
Nuke ‘em from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
Update (June 17, 2004): Still broken. Today’s tech pulled out a page on the excuse calendar: “Need to upgrade from Frame-Relay DSL to ATM DSL.” Unfortunately, according to DSL Reports, that’s code for “you’re screwed.” They’re saying that I need to cancel my current DSL service, re-order new service on the same line, and put up with dial-up for a month or so while they straighten it out. Technically, it’s about 5 minutes worth of work, but they’re a telco. Did I mention that they’ve been billing me for the higher speed for almost 3 weeks now? It’s just about time to pull out my “Complain to PUC” card.
Posted in Computer Networking | Tags broken, dsl, verizon | no comments
