Thursday, January 10, 2008 6:47 PM
Today is the day. FiOS is now installed. Here are a few tips that I gathered from reading about everyone else experiences. Ask the guy to do ethernet from the ONT box. They can and will do it only if you ask. Otherwise you will get Coax cable to your supplied Actiontec MI424 Router. Now, I can not confirm or deny this, but I think there is a lag if you use the Coax method of an additional 5 ms or so. If anyone can confirm this, please let me know.
Here is my tracert (trace route) for FiOS to this site (residing on a gigabit fiber network on Level3's backbone).
Tracing route to threadabort.com [4.79.230.85]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms myrouter [192.168.49.1]
2 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms l100.vfttp-07.nrflva.verizon-gni.net [72.84.94.1]
3 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms p4-3.lcr-01.nrflva.verizon-gni.net [130.81.58.64]
4 9 ms 9 ms 8 ms so-6-3-0-0.BB-RTR2.RES.verizon-gni.net [130.81.29.92]
5 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 0.so-7-1-0.xl4.iad8.alter.net [152.63.39.165]
6 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 0.ge-7-0-0.br2.iad8.alter.net [152.63.41.157]
7 * 9 ms 9 ms 4.68.63.165
8 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms ae-22-79.car2.washington1.level3.net [4.68.17.68]
9 10 ms 11 ms 11 ms bandwidthco.car2.washington1.level3.net [4.79.19.110]
10 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms 4.79.230.85
Well, a 2 ms drop is very acceptable compared to Cox's 6-8 ms drop.
Here is the new speakeasy.net speed test:
As you can see I get pretty close to the 30/15 number I signed up for. The upstream test doesn't seem to be that fair anyways since it happens so quick. But, Verizon Fios is not fudging any numbers here.
Since I have a very specialized WRT-54gs router, I installed that after the tech guy left. I love to use DD-WRT on my Linksys router, so I wanted that back. It performs just as well as the ActionTec router as far as I can tell.
If you want to use your own router here are some tips:
- You must have Ethernet to the ONT (The box outside that the fiber goes into). You can ask for it later, but it is not as easy to install. You will have to call Verizon to switch it if you wait.
- Make sure you use MAC Clone on your router and set it to the MAC address listed on the ActionTech router.
- Turn off STP if you have an option to. I couldn't get the router to pick up DHCP until this was off.
- If you have FiOS TV, check out Verizon_FIOS_setup_with_dd-wrt_as_primary_router
And finally, a gallery of pictures:
http://www.threadabort.com/threadabort/gallery/24.aspx
UPDATE (1/12/2008) : I switched back to the ActionTec Router. It is far faster than my Linksys WRT-54GS. The Linksys would have trouble at 30mbps.