Verizon, Fiber Or Die?

How paltry… - by blankoboy (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Sorry but “which boasts 3 Mbps down and 758 Kbps up”? I wouldn’t be boasting too much about that service. If you were to rank the US in terms of their internet connectivity they really are almost a 3rd world country.

$50/month here in Japan gets me 100Mbps (up and down) FTTH with no caps in place. Yes, you can all say “well Japan is such a small and densely populated country so of course they can all be wired up like that”, which I hear so often. Well, why can’t the US do this for their main cities as they are all densely populated. If they were to take this approach and then build high bandwidth links interconnecting these cities it could be done.

But the real problem here is that the telecoms and politicians are too busy filling their pockets and planning how to spy on you to care about doing anything to improve their networks.

Oh stop - by Sycraft-fu (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I get real tired of people getting up with this national pride over Internet. So you got cheap Internet? Ok, great. How much does your apartment cost? How large is it? My condo is 167 square meters (1800 square feet). It has a nice courtyard with a pool, a large parking lot and so on. I own it, I don’t rent, the mortgage is about 78,000 JPY (760 USD) including all taxes and such. So how’s that stack up to your place? 
 
Now I’m not trying to brag here, I am making a point that different countries are, well, different. Even different areas of the same country are different. So it is great that you can get cheap Internet access, but have you considered everything involved in that? Have you considered that your situation might not be the same as everyone else’s? Is it even the same in all of Japan? Can you get that same access in, say Tono (which despite being rural for Japan is larger than many US towns)? 
 
Another part to consider is are they really giving you 100mbit Internet, or are they giving you a 100mbit connection to a WAN that is connected to the Internet? What I mean is generally speaking in the US, when you buy a connection you get the given bandwidth to anywhere. Your connection to your neighbour is no faster or slower than to anywhere else. The ISP has sufficient upstream to support that to their backbones and so on. So with my 10mbit link, I find that I get that to pretty much anywhere that also has sufficient bandwidth. It isn’t just things on my network, it is anywhere on the Internet. 
 
Well in informal testing, I’ve found that isn’t always true with foreign ISPs. I remember several years ago when I worked for network operations on campus, I was testing with someone in Sweden, they were on a DSL service called BBB. 10mbit to the home, which at the time was pretty high end. However, they got crap connections to us, about 256kbit. Well, the problem wasn’t on our end. I checked the routers, they were all fine, I checked the links, they were all low usage (below 20%), I tried transfers to a number of known high bandwidth sites in various places, all went fast. 
 
A little playing around revealed that more or less BBB was a huge WAN, like we had on campus. They provided a high speed connection between you and them. So anyone else on the same ISP you got blazing fast speeds to. However they didn’t have the bandwidth to support it to the rest of the Internet. So if you hopped off their network, things got much, MUCH slower. 
 
So is your situation similar? It wouldn’t surprise me if it was, because larger links cost lots and lots of money. It isn’t a linear scale. While 100mbit gear is pretty cheap, if you have a bunch of people on 100mbit, you can’t have a 100mbit uplink. If you do, that means that they’ll only get their full rate if they are the only on using it. That don’t mean you need dedicated bandwidth per person, but you do need more than what they each get. So while 100 people x 100mbit doesn’t need a 10gbit uplink, you probably should have a 1gbit uplink, maybe more. Well the same thing is true at higher levels, and it starts to add up pretty quick to needing some real big links, if you are actually offering people that speed to the Internet. 
 
Otherwise, you have a situation like we do on campus. I have a gig connection to my desktop at work. The switch it is connected to has a gig to our firewall, that has redundant gig to the building switch, which has redundant gig to the distribution switch, which has redundant gig to the core, which has redundant gig to the edge. However I wouldn’t say I have a gig net connection. Why? Well two things: 
 
1) At each of those levels, the connection is only a gig, but I am sharing with more people. Our building probably has 500 computers in it, the distribution switches it connects to probably handle 50 buildings, and the whole campus connects to the core switches. So while I could get a gig all the way to the core, I could only do it if I were the only one using it. In reality, I have to share with lots of other people. 
 
2) We d

I work for a telco. - by dadragon (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
I work for a smallish Canadian telco. We offer DSL, IPTV, and telephone all over copper. Our infrastructure is all FTTN, and you can pull 10mbps at 600m easy. If you’re on our service, 20mbps is possible if you have HDTV. There’s one of two things going on here. Verizon is trying to screw you, or there’s something wrong with your line. 
 
If it’s the former Verizon won’t help you. If it’s the latter, a tech should be able to fix it. If you’re only 550m from the CO you might not have an access cabinet in between you and the CO, but there should be many pairs into the pedestal near your house. A tech should be able to just do a pair change and fix it. The other thing that could happen is a port change in the CO. Both of these are quick, as long as the CO is manned. We have about 25 in this city, and only 1 is manned full time.

Don’t jump to conclusions - by Dan East (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
A couple years ago when we moved into our current house we signed up for DSL. Things were good for a couple months, then connectivity became very poor and spotty. Throughput was bad, and the line would completely drop from time to time. We had 6 different tech guys come to our house. Each would hook up his diagnostic machine, which would sync up with the office and show really good connectivity and throughput. They swapped out our modem at least 4 times. They said that since the meter showed the line was good, the problem was mine. One guy started screwing around with my computers before I finally told him to stop (throughput was fine on my LAN). Finally, this one guy came out, and he was determined to get to the bottom of it. He at least had the intelligence to say that just because his equipment told him everything was fine, the fact that a modem couldn’t sync meant otherwise. He ran a new line from the pole to the house. Then he helped run a new line all the way to my office (even though they’re supposed to charge for that). He had a guy at the office switch the node we physically connected into. Still bad connectivity. So he then went from pole to pole from my house to the office, which is at least a dozen blocks. He finally found a splice that was connected with old-style crimp on connectors. Apparently there was some corrosion in them, which increased the resistance just exactly enough that the modem couldn’t tolerate it, but the diagnostic equipment could (and the resistance was within tolerable limits). He replaced the splice, and everything has been perfect for well over a year. He gave me his own cell number and told me to call him direct if we ever had further problems. 
 
So my point is not to jump to conclusions. There could be a physical problem with your line that happened about when the FiOS was rolling out. Try hooking your modem directly to your Network Interface Box (usually on the side of the house) with all of your interior wiring disconnected (should just be a little jumper going into a regular phone jack - unplug it and plug your modem straight in). If your throughput goes up, you have a problem with your interior wiring. If it doesn’t, the DSL provider is obligated to fix the problem. Make sure you tell them that you hooked your modem up directly to the network interface box, because the tech person should then immediately schedule someone to come out instead of having you try bridging your DSL modem and a bunch of other worthless garbage. They will still probably tell you to hard-reset your modem, but after that then they should send someone out. As in my case, it might take several different techs to find someone that can actually help. Same with support on the phone. Some people would randomly pick things out of some list a computer showed them, and ask me to follow various worthless steps. Other people knew exactly what was not wrong, based on what I told them up front, and so they didn’t beat around the bush.

At least you can get FiOS… - by SuperBanana (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

…because in Boston, which just so happens to be the silicon valley of the east coast (and has been for decades), I can’t get FiOS.

Why? Verizon is holding the entire city hostage and refusing to do a fucking thing until they get a state-wide cable TV franchise license so they don’t have to play on the same field as the cable operators (who have always had to negotiate per-town.) Look at the verizon deployment maps; it’s a sea of blue and green, except for a giant void near Boston.

They’ve fed all sorts of bullshit to people; at one point, they were claiming that they were not doing “metropolitan areas.” Funny: I guess New York City and DC aren’t metropolitan areas? Everyone in the burbs and even the boondocks in eastern MA gets FiOS, but no, not Boston…