I was persuaded to replace my Comcast service with Verizon FiOS and have been posting as the adventure unfolds (see Embarking on a FiOS adventure and Embarking on a FiOS adventure Day 2 if you’re really bored and can’t think of nothing better to do.)
At this point, everything is working. HD television channels look really good. I haven’t seen any pixelated pictures even though the weather wasn’t all that good (for here) over the last two days. The FiOS Internet service has been measured to perform over twice as fast as Comcast did, but still doesn’t quite live up to what was promised.
Javier Castillo, one of Verizon’s social media support people, has arranged for one of the local FiOS support people to come out and help me find out what is happening. He, by the way, has been extremely friendly and quite professional. I’ll update this post if I learn what was happening.
1:30 PM ET Update
Javier Castillo called me to let me know that the service representative had picket up the trouble ticket and would call me before coming out.
2:15 PM ET Update
Doug, a Verizon service representative, called from a town about 25 miles South of my office. He said that he’d be here by 3 PM ET.
3 PM ET Update
Doug arrived within a few moments of the time he promised. He came right in and plugged a laptop into the router. I demonstrated speedtest.net and testmy.net performance of 25+ Mbps download and 12+ Mbps figures.
Doug visited speedtest.verizon.com and demonstrated to me that their own internal test site showed 30.214 Mbps download speed and 36.984 upload speeds. When I visited that site from my own production systems, I saw the same results. I commented that this was a somewhat artificial test. It was totally within the Verizon environment and wasn’t a real world test.
Just to rule out one other factor, Doug visited speedtest.net and testmy.net and ran the tests. He saw similar test results to those I got when visiting those sites.
Doug suggested that I visit speakeasy.net and try the performance test there. The test results were 31.03 Mbps down and 28.14 Mbps up.
That was a real world, off of Verizon’s own internal network. It demonstrated that my issue wasn’t with my systems, the network configuration or Verizon’s service. It was the three test sites I chose for testing.
To quote several famous detective characters, “The case is closed.”
I’d like to thank Verizon for helping me resolve this issue. To a person, they were pleasant, friendly and helpful.
