[PLUG] Experience with Verizon FIOS & wireless installation

[george@georgesbasement.com]

Some words about our recent installation of Verizon FIOS out in the 'burbs.

The Sales Lady was quite helpful and suggested bundling FIOS with our
phone and TV when I inquired about DSL after a competitor's modem
[or the line] died and no one seemed inclined to help very much in the
foreseeable future.  An appointment was made for within a week and the
Tech Guy called ahead of time to confirm.  Two Tech Guys showed up
within the time frame and started setting things up in a businesslike
manner.  They installed the hardware & battery backup in my upstairs-
bedroom "office" without any dire warnings ... all was going well.

When the time came (already after about four hours' work, much of that
spent stringing 550 feet of fiber-optic cable) the Lead Tech bid his buddy
nightie-nite and set up the router from his own laptop.  Then he set up my
WinXP laptop for wireless, and finally my missus' WinXP desktop ... with
some difficulty.  Later, I found out why ...

After things seemed to be under control for the evening, I set up my linux-
based Smoothwall hardware firewall in a couple of hours.  I was lucky in
that I properly guessed the right file to modify (/etc/resolv.conf) to insert
the new Verizon nameserver's IP address, and I guessed that all I had to
do after running the Smoothwall's Setup process was just to reboot it.
Beforehand I had set up a dummy placeholder in the router with the
Smoothwall's network interface card's MAC address and static IP address.
The linux-based Smoothwall network is all hard-wired, and that ran
flawlessly right from the get-go.

Wireless was another matter.  We both got dropped off the wireless
connections repeatedly ... and finally we couldn't connect at all.  A
few calls to Verizon's Tech Support produced, late Saturday night,
a Knowledgable Tech guy (Roger, if you must know ...) who spotted
our difficulty - interference from an unknown wireless source, which
confused the wireless NIC's as to what channel they were connecting
on.  Roger got me more-or-less to the right channel, and then I called
it a night.

Next day, I got cocky and tried to drag the laptop out to a shed where
I wanted to be able to use it wirelessly.  No amount of fiddling with the
channel setting in the router's basic security menu had any effect - I
always got a strong signal indication but no connection.  Then I turned
off a nearby security camera, and BANG - connection !  Rock solid ever
since. Knock wood.  Helps to be in the middle of the Happy Range when
the camera gets unplugged finally.

The Verizon's Tech Guys apparently don't all know enough about the
channel setting (or assume we are so dumb we can't change it right) to
advise clients with wireless connectivity problems.  That may be the
cause of a high percentage of the dissatisfied customers.

In the meantime, I've set up a proper username and password (from the
router's "admin" & "password1") as well as a 128-bit WEP key. Any
other security advice from the PLUG group ?  Oh, yeah - the web interface
works just fine with the debian PC's.

The Smoothwall cuts the download speed in half, but the upload speed
is about the max. for my account (5Mbps down/2Mbps up).  I downloaded
about 200 MB of upgrades to the two debian PC's behind the Smoothwall
with Aptitude in about fifteen minutes (250kBps).  That's six times the
maximum I was getting with DSL.

Good stuff, that FIOS !

George Langford
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