We have FiOS now. The installers from Verizon left at about 2:30 yesterday afternoon, with handsful of cookies from my wife and thanks from me. They started work about 10 am. In the four and a half hours (including a lunch break) in between, they:
- Installed a new wall box (shown) to take the fiber from the street and convert its signal to TV, Internet, and phone
- Ran phone, WAN, and coax into my media panel so that all existing phone, Ethernet, and cable hookups in the house worked
- Leveraged the existing basement drop to connect the living room jack–the only one not already hooked into the media panel–into the media panel
- Installed a new wireless base station
- Ran fiber into the house and lit up the whole network
- Pulled off the old copper line and house-side box
So: Now gone is all but the last remnant of Comcast. Their box is still on the side of the house, but the three splitters that were between their box and the wall are gone. The new TV signal goes directly from the fiber into my media wiring box and gets split once across the five live jacks in the house. No wonder the picture is better. The phone works well too.
On the other hand, I’m still working through some Internet issues. I couldn’t get my existing base station, an AirPort Extreme, to see the new base station, so I shut it down temporarily–taking my shared music drive offline. I also wasn’t able to get my two AirPort Express units, which provide networking for the printer and AirTunes to my living room stereo, hooked into the new network, but I suspect that’s easily fixed once I get a little dedicated time.
The punchline? Using the SpeakEasy speed test, I recorded up to about 19.5 Mbps down and about 4.9 Mbps up, at multiple times during the day. That’s comparable to the Comcast up rate but about twice as fast as Comcast down.
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