FiOS - Finally a solution for the last mile?

I had Fiber Optics (FiOS) to the house installed by Verizon at my house yesterday. This means that my telephone and Internet connections now travel over fiber optics to Verizon’s central office.

Here are my first impressions after living with FiOS for the past 24 hours. Your mileage may vary.

FiOS prices and options

Verizon’s FiOS comes in three flavors:

• 5 MBps down from the Internet / 2 MBps up to the Internet (i.e. 5/2) at $34.95/month
• 15 MBps / 2 MBps at $44.95/month
• 30 MBps / 5 MBps at $179.95/month

These prices are based upon a 1 year commitment. You can find out more about this new service here. I opted for the 5/2 option for now. If necessary, Verizon can always upgrade me remotely to a faster option without resetting my 1 year commitment.

As a point of reference, Comcast delivers *up* to 6 MBps down and 384 KBps up at $60.95 or discounted to $45.95 since I have my cable TV through Comcast.

For the price, Verizon gave me a D-Link DI 624 all-in-one router, firewall, DHCP server, 4-ports switch and 802.11g wireless access point. Verizon also installed a fiber optic hub that replaced the copper telephone wire going to the street. So your Internet and phone connections travel over the same fiber strand. Finally, I got a backup UPS that keeps the fiber hub powered in the event of a loss of power. Much more on this further below.

I opted to keep my Linksys firewall/VPN endpoint router because I found that it offered a more secure configuration than the D-Link (as reported by Shields Up) and I don’t need wireless connectivity for now.

Note that you retain the same phone number(s) when switching to FiOS. Furthermore, with FiOS you can have, standard, up to 4 different phone numbers connected to your house. I believe that this is twice as many phone numbers as over copper.

Verizon also hopes to deliver TV over fiber too. They have already implemented this in Texas, but now need to negotiate the necessary permissions for this in every targeted town; one town at a time!

Performance Comparison

On paper, Verizon’s FiOS is currently about 25% to 43% cheaper than Comcast’s ISP service. Or by selecting Verizon’s 15/2 option, you can get about 3 times Comcast’s performance for the same price. One thing to remember about cable access to the Internet is that the entire neighborhood shares the same 6 MBps pipeline with you. FiOS, on the other hand, is a dedicated link between Verizon’s central office and your house.

To test performance of the two ISPs, I went to Numion to measure bandwidth, surfing speed and latency results. I’ve included my FiOS results in the attached PDF report. The bottom line is that Verizon’s 5/2 performed significantly better than Comcast’s 6/0.384. This is particularly true for web surfing speeds where Numion reported a 5 to 1 advantage for FiOS over cable.

You should note that my external IP changed every time I re-connected to my uplink router (PPPoE connection). With Comcast, my external IP number pretty much stayed the same over the 3+ years I had the service even after multiple reboots of my router.

Another point to note is that the voice quality during phone calls is supposed to be much better over fiber than over copper. However, I have not yet tested this so I won’t comment on it.

It’s Not All Rosy

The major negative that I have found so far is the following: unlike telephone copper wires that carry their own power from the central office to power every phone in the house, fiber optic links must be powered externally. So the fiber hub that gets installed at your house also serves to power the transmission of light through the equipment. The catch is that when you lose power to that hub, you also lose the ability to make phone calls. To mitigate this risk, Verizon installed a battery powered uninterruptible power supply (UPS). This UPS works in three stages:

• The first stage preserves the ability to receive inbound and make outbound phone calls for 2 hours following the loss of power. Note that Internet access is lost regardless of any UPS you may have on your router and computer.
• The second stage preserves the ability to make emergency *outbound* calls only for the next 6 hours. At the end of this second stage, the phone system looses dial tone.
• However, there is a third and final stage. The UPS has a special 1 hour reserve that can be activated manually when it becomes necessary to make an outbound call. I don’t know if it can be only activated for say 5 minutes, then deactivated until the next time an outbound phone call needs to be made.

To further mitigate these risks, remember that a fully charged cell phone should last you about 48 hours. You probably have bigger problems that this if the loss of power lasts this long. However, besides recharging your cell phone while at work, there may be an acceptable alternative: buy a spare UPS that will allow you to recharge your cell phone only in the event of long lasting power loss. This solution should allow you to recharge your cell phone multiple times in the event of a prolonged power failure.

Does FiOS finally solve the last mile problem or is wireless broadband a better solution? Will the power limitations to the phone system prevent the wide acceptance of FiOS? Can Verizon compete against the current Cable TV delivery systems? What do you think?