FIOS internet problems.... WHY ME???!!!!!

[j_cizzo]

I wish I had this kinda luck with the lottery tickets...   EVERYONE says 'fios is great!!  get fios!!!  i'm naming my first born Fios!!..."

so, after being a loyal and generally very satisfied cablevision customer for several years, I thought verizon had the bugs worked out of their package and all should be great by now...  WRONG!!!

I place the order on 12/7 or 12/8 with a rep who was very friendly and pleasant to talk with (so far so good), she scheduled an appointment for the install that friday (2 days later, i was impressed, again so far so good), the technician to do the install showed up early and was awesome! (His name was Patrick and was "THE MAN!", really nice, put a lot of effort into his work, wanted to get it done right the old-school way).  I was a network engineer gone-finance, have all cisco equipment in my house with cat 6 cabling for my workstation(s)..  he saw my gear, knew i wasn't an average user and was professional about it (ie. didn't give me line after line like the phone-based tech support does). 

So, after all was said and done, we plug in the gear and blaaaah, my 35/35 connection was running only at about 8/9..  thru various tests, i figured that someone had my provisioning set for half-duplex.. Patrick called one of his back-office tech buddies and that sunday viola, full-duplex and i was cruising at a consistent 43/36..  

for the rest of the week before cancelling cablevision i put my connection thru the ringer to make sure all was stable and ready to link to the exchanges (stock markets) and all was great!  i cancelled my cablevision service and all seemed good...

Sunday comes along and blaaaah, my connection is terrible again.  i open a ticket, and without any follow up, i receive a text saying the ticket was closed.   my service still was bad..  tv seemed fine (shook a bit at times but otherwise ok) but internet was all over the place, dropping packets, etc..  i open a ticket again, and days later they finally get in touch with me.  i get a text saying the technician will be out. 

so I'm in the bathroom at work today and my phone starts ringing, it's verizon, but i can't answer the phone because i'm in the bathroom.  i call them back immediately and had to listen to their music for 20 minutes, no one picked up.  i had to get back to work, so i called from my desk again.. 20 minutes of the music, no pick up..  called a 3rd time, 18 minutes in, someone picks up.  while i'm making the call from my desk phone, i get a text saying "the verizon tech missed you, please call to reschedule..."..  all from the same tech support number. 

so i'm rescheduled for tomorrow afternoon.  so i call tonight about my bill because the woman who i signed up with said my total bill -taxes, fees and tariffs, etc... would be $127.21/month but my bill is different and the guy on the phone said it will actually be closer to $150.00/month..

Now, i'm a really nice and understanding person, and I (without any tone or anger, b/c i have no reason to be frustrated with the guy from billing) say "i understand that your service is supposed to be stellar in terms of reliability, but i haven't had that experience, and i told him that of the 3 weeks i've had the service, it's only worked properly for 1 week and i've been given the run-around in getting it fixed..  would he be mind extending my 30 day trial another 30 days so that I once all is working properly i can get better assurance that it's all it claims to be?  (i think that's perfectly reasonible) ...with an unwarranted attitude, he tells me that i'm stuck with the 30 day trial b/c that's the policy...  I said I understand hes not in a position to make the call, so would he mind asking his manager who might be in the position to make the exception?  with even MORE attitude now he tells me his manager isn't gonna do that..  basically, i just have to deal with it...

and on top of all this, just as my service goes caput on me, verizon rolls out my current plan but with a 50/20 connection!!

It would be GREAT if a REAL technician/engineer could read this and actually help me resolve my issues..

I have until Jan 8, 2012 to cancel my service without termination charges and so far it looks like it's going to end.

Honestly, i've had cablevision for several years, that i can remember, i've had it go down on me ONCE and when i expressed the importance that my connection be repaired ASAP because my livelyhood depends upon it, they had someone out within 4 hours, on a weekend. 

NO, i'm not plugging cablevision..  competition is good!  but can i please get someone to help me out with my problem??

If everyone worked with the same tenacity and dedication as the technician who installed the ONT and new fiber run and helped me pull the cable, life with this service would be a beautiful thing!..

[j_cizzo]

Oh, and just to give an idea of my setup and my diagnosis and blah blah blah...

the data feed comes out the ONT (612A) via the ethernet, tv via coax (obviously) the router/firewalling is done via a cisco 891 router which ONLY functions as a firewall, no routing, no dhcp serving (it's fast fast fast), the routing and ip addressing is handled by a cisco layer 3 switch.  i have my own wireless access point and the verizon stb get it's vod/etc via a verizon-issued NIM...  all works fine that way..

the actiontec is only ever plugged in for tech support.  when all worked properly, i attained higher throughput with my own equipment..  never needed to run the optimizer.

the fastest throughput readings came from speedtest.net, where i specified the clifton ITX because its very close.

the verizon speedtest (speedtest.verizon.net) registered even slower speeds 2-3m down, 6-8m up.  that's with the actiontec (a new one btw, because from the first ticket, they claimed my origina actiontec was bad, so they sent me a new one).

2 actiontecs, 2 different cisco routers, even plugging my laptop directly into the ONT...   whether half-duplex, full Duplex, 10mb or 100mb, autonegotiate...   didn't matter all getting the same results..

[smith6612]

The Clifton, NJ Server (Fortress ITX) is a beast. I've thrown Gigabit links over at the Datacenter I work at towards that server and it's given no problem clocking in 600+Mbps (measured not by the Flash applet, but by a network monitor). Sounds like you also have yourself a nice setup at home too. Cisco gear and all. Granted, the Verizon speed test server for the Northeast region is also a beast, as I've clocked 934Mbps/940Mbps as a best result to that server in the past. I guess it depends on the route you take to that server and how busy it is. It's NDT-based, but I think Verizon might have disabled the max cocurrent testing limits on it. I could check by slamming it with two Gigabit connections tomorrow 🙂

I guess problems happen to the best of us. I remember two weeks after getting hooked up with DSL, Verizon had an outage over the course of 4 days in my area that resulted in no PPPoE connectivity. The modem was synced, but no route. That was a pain to get fixed even though it was a blanket problem with the area. I just hope Verizon checked the provisioning three times (well, maybe not that many) before sending a tech out. A lot of FiOS speed related issues are just things on the CO end that don't warrant an ONT replacement.