FiOS – Living with it for 3 weeks…

I have been living with a fiber optic based broadband connection (FiOS) to my house for 3 weeks now. Here are some of my impressions.

Downloads are faster but…

Network throughput is largely dependent on the size of the file being downloaded. This is because the two endpoint systems (your computer and the server you are accessing) progressively negotiate larger and larger packets of data if they find that the connection (i.e. the Internet) can handle them reliably. If the connection starts dropping packets, the systems will back off and reduce the packet size, thus reducing throughput. As a result, it takes time before two connected systems achieve a high steady-state throughput.

To put my connection through its paces, I tested my FiOS throughput by downloading some very large, publicly available files, from sources known for having huge pipelines to the Internet. Here are two examples:

• MSDN January 2006 Library – I downloaded the latest MSDN Library (2.8 GB)from Microsoft’s MSDN subscriptions web site using File Transfer Manager v5.0. The throughput was initially stable at 65 KB/sec for about 20 minutes. However, within about an hour, it had increased to 635 KB/sec or about 10 times faster. I don’t remember numbers even half this fast with my cable connection.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs lectures from MIT - This is the famous lecture given by Abelson and Sussman. You can download these fascinating 10 lectures from MIT’s servers as 20 MPEG files of about 1.5 GB each. You can find them here: http://swiss.ai.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures. I tested using the [download] option, not the [torrent] one. My throughput was about 593 KB/sec. Downloading two video files concurrently halved this speed. The speed was also halved when I downloaded the MSDN library along with one of the lecture videos from MIT.

My first conclusion is that I was able to max out the throughput of my FiOS connection to about 600+ KB/sec. Just a reminder that I have a 5 Mb/sec down and 2 Mb/sec up connection. Had I not maxed out my fiber connection, I would have seen no degradation in speed as I added downloads from a different source of servers. In other words, I should not have seen any drop in throughput, or at least a limited one, when I downloaded files from both MIT and Microsoft concurrently.

This conclusion begs another question: when will the content providers reach a limit (technical or financial) in their ability to deliver content at high-speed to more and more individuals who have fatter and fatter pipelines to the Internet. After all, many of us have a pipeline to the Internet that is fatter than the one used by our employer. NOTE: I am talking pure bandwidth here. Digital leased lines such as T-1s and T-3s have other desirable characteristics over home-based connection lines.

My second conclusion is that you probably should not pay for high bandwidth if you are mostly going to be downloading small files, say in the order of tens of megabytes. This is because the systems take a significant amount of time (in the order of an hour) to saturate a relatively large pipeline like a FiOS connection. It would have been very interesting to repeat this test with, say, a 15 or even 30 MB/sec down FiOS connection. If someone from Verizon FiOS is reading this, I would be VERY interested in a free upgrade to the 30/5 plan to test this and further report on my experience.

FiOS broadband is sensitive to power loss

I have found that my FiOS connection is more sensitive to losses of power than DSL and cable. This is obviously hard to verify because losses of power happen unpredictably in my area. Additionally, conducting a controlled experiment would be rather difficult. However, I distinctly remember being able to surf the net with my cable and DSL connections while experiencing power outages at my residence. This wasn’t the case with FiOS even though I have more battery powered UPSes than before. As I mentioned in a previous posting on FiOS, the UPS attached to the FiOS hub provides power preferentially to the phone system over Internet connectivity in the case of loss of power. This is important to remember for those of you who have selected a VoIP vendor as your primary phone system carrier. Hence the importance of having a fully charged cell phone around.

Can you hear me now? - Odd dropped connections

I have also experienced odd outages with my instant messaging software. My connections to both, the MSN and Yahoo servers sometimes drop over the course of a day. Although usually not often noticeable, it can be aggravating when you are in the middle of a conversation and the drop lasts a matter of a minute or more. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

To try to resolve this problem, I changed slightly the configuration on my router. I went from ‘Connect on Demand with Max Idle of 5 min.’ to ‘Keep Alive: Redial Period 30 sec.’ on my PPPoE settings.

I am having trouble reconciling these intermittent outages with the fact that I’ve experienced fewer dropped PING packets over FiOS than over cable. PING packets are used to verify the end-to-end connectivity between two network devices or systems. NOTE: many network administrators disable PING responses for security reasons.

I tested the quality of the connections using the following command at a DOS prompt:

C:\>ping www.cisco.com –t > c:\temp\pingcisco.log

This command continuously pings a Cisco web server and redirects ( ‘>’ ) the results from the screen to a text file named ‘pingcisco.log’ that will be created in the Temp directory on drive C. This command will run until you interrupt it by pressing Ctrl-C. I chose to run this test for a couple of hours but you could easily do so for days on end. Now open the log file with a text editor like ‘UltraEdit-32’ (Thanks IDM for a great tool!) or using ‘Notepad’. Jump to the end of the file and one of the statistics you will get is the number of dropped packets (% loss). Usually, the fewer the packets lost, the better the quality of the connection. On the other hand, remember that the problem could be at Cisco’s or Yahoo’s end too, however unlikely this may be. NOTE: other parameters, such as latency time in particular, also reflect the quality of a connection. Latency is the time, usually expressed in milliseconds that it takes for a PING packet to reach the remote server and travel back: the lower the latency, the better the connection.

The table below compares the % of dropped PING packets between my cable and FiOS connections when pinging Cisco and Yahoo servers.

• Cable => Cisco (71% loss) => Yahoo (36% loss)
• FiOS => Cisco (53% loss) => Yahoo (0% loss)

I conclude from these data that the quality of the connection is better using FiOS than cable. This conclusion seems at odds with the experience I had had with my instant messengers.

Can any reader offer an explanation and a fix for this?

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?

Welcome to my blog

My name is Michel Biedermann. I’m originally from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, but now live in the United States. Currently, I work for the Business Consulting Services (BCS) division of IBM.

I’m most interested in a new field of software development that attempts to combine two apparently contradictory methodologies: the Agile process which favors relying purely on the ability of individual team members and CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) which instead trusts a process and conformance to this process. This new methodology is referred to as Agile CMMI and is probably best represented right now by Microsoft's MSF 4.0 based CMMI module of the Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) platform.

I will be blogging about a variety of technology issues, including the software development life cycle (SDLC), the alignment of tactical with strategic business goals, my life at IBM and other musings as the mood strikes me. I will try to make sense of and assess the impact of concepts like CMMI, Agile, LEAN, FDD, TDD, SDLC, project management, continuous process improvement, the importance and ROI of quality, etc. Mix in a little balanced scorecard, development metrics measurements, Six-sigma, Peter Drucker, and maybe even some Jimmy Buffet, and you pretty much get the picture of what I plan to discuss.

Whether you agree or disagree with my point of view, I ask you to take a minute to communicate with me. Let me know what YOU think: what has worked for you, what hasn’t, and most importantly why!