I’m on another flight from New York City to San Francisco on Virgin flight 25. Like my American Airlines flight a few weeks ago, this flight has Internet service from Gogo. The speed is still fairly respectable:
Shortly after I returned from my last trip to San Francisco, my Verizon Fios installation was finally completed. The installer was prompt and professional. Interestingly, it turns out that the last installer who visited my apartment could have done the installation; he did not realized that fiber was already pulled to my apartment. The setup for Fios is interesting. There are direct pre-terminated fiber pulls from the basement of my apartment building to just outside of each apartment. The installer drilled a small hole into my coat closet in the apartment from the hallway cable run.
The fiber was plugged into an Optical Network Terminal (ONT), which acts as a bridge between the fiber media and a choice of 100Base-T Ethernet, MOCA, or plain old telephone service (POTS). The ONT comes packaged with a battery backup. I was a bit surprised to see that only a single strand of fiber was pulled into my apartment–most of the networking I have worked with uses two strands of fiber. I am using the 100Base-T Ethernet connection to a wireless router; hopefully I will later use the coax connection for television. Verizon plans on introducing TV service to my building in the third quarter of 2009.
Here was the network performance with Time Warner Cable Roadrunner:
Here was the network performance with Verizon Fios:
I have had no outages with Verizon Fios, and despite the pain of scheduling installation, I’m very happy with the performance so far. Now I need to make sure that the sites I use to store files have sufficient incoming bandwidth. For a well-connected site, the performance is very good. I was able to download a 145 MB trailer for Watchmen with no noticeable delay.