Installing Verizon FIOS fiber-optic Internet service to my house
A detailed description of what you see in your neighborhood, on the line near your house, on the side of your house, and inside when you get Verizon's FIOS Internet service.

In your neighborhood
Fiber-optic cable is strung all around the city. Each cable has thick insulation and many strands of fiber inside. Here is a piece of the thinner cable that is strung to a house:


There is cable from the main office that goes to distribution boxes throughout the city. Each box can serve several blocks of homes. Here's a normal street with the cable on the telephone/electric poles and a view of one of these distribution boxes with two types of splicing boxes on either side:

The cables specific to a block have housings every once in a while for connections to the houses. Here is the one that serves my neighbor, along with a close-up of the place where the cables come in. The cable with the orange "Fiber Optic Cable" covering is the one that goes down the block. The thinner cables plugged in are to houses. There are two connected here -- I'm clearly not the first person on my block to have fiber.

Installation day
The day of installation finally arrived. The installer showed up sometime after 8 AM, as they said. They schedule enough time to spend the whole day if necessary (just setting up your computer could be a time sink and often is if you were previously on dial-up). His job is to put an Optical Network Terminal unit (ONT) on the side of, or inside, your house. The fiber-optic cable connects to the ONT and the Internet connection comes out of it as a normal 100BaseT cable.

Here is a picture of the truck, the sign he put up while working (just like painters and roofers, etc. -- marketing is an important component here as Verizon competes with the cable companies -- we have Comcast and RCN in our area -- and tries to sign up customers), and the ONT in the box it came in:

We decided to put it where the telephone boxes were already, next to the electric meter.

When they put in fiber, they want to replace the copper for your phone lines, too. They take all the residential phone lines (unless you have a good objection or it doesn't work) and replace them with connections through the ONT. They don't do business lines, yet, so only some of the lines into my house got changed over. The installer decided that the really old phone connection box needed to go and moved the business lines (Software Garden has some) all over to one good box. He didn't actually remove the wires (which they will eventually do) since the ones I have are too intertwined with the business lines they aren't removing.

The installer showed me a list of phones devices their system is not compatible with. These are apparently ones which don't work well on the standard ring voltages provided by the ONT. (I think they found this out after complaints from customers that things weren't working.) It includes some Casio answering machines, Radio Shack Caller ID boxes, and a few more units.

Here's a "before" picture showing the telephone connection boxes and one with the ONT mounted (and open) with the old telephone box hanging:

Here's what the inside of the ONT looks like before most of the wires are connected. The fiber cable comes up on the left with the cap removed (and dangling). Cable slack is stored in a housing behind the ONT (you want to have slack since you'd rather not cut or lengthen fiber cables). I have a close-up of the power connectors, too. The unit needs lots of connections into the house for power and backup power.

The installer had to do some things with his laptop to have them switch over my phone numbers from the copper wires to the fiber and turn on the Internet connectivity, etc. That takes a while and he went out for a late lunch while it happened. Since I had more than one line (each with its own work order) he ended up making some calls to finish getting them all done. The laptop is a ruggedized Panasonic with a touch screen and wireless (citywide, not WiFi) connection to their VPN.

Once everything checked out, he hooked up the normal D-Link router they include in the deal. I had him use his laptop to set things up because I didn't want to install their software (as I recall, Verizon likes giving you who-knows-what to "help" them give you support, put in the free MSN Premium that's included, etc.). I just wanted to get the service going and over the next few days I'll figure out how I want to connect it into the computers and networks in the house.

Once that was all done, the installer cleaned up all the dropped wire insulation, empty boxes, etc., and we said goodbye sometime around 4 PM. I then connected my line to the router and plugged it into my laptop upstairs. Things work well. I downloaded a log file from the bricklin.com server and got a download at over 13Mb/second. I uploaded a 25MB podcast as a test and got 1.95Mb/second. Pretty good. I logged into the router (the name and password got set to my Verizon ones) and saw that it was configured as a normal PPPoE just like my DSL connection was.

That's it.

- Dan Bricklin, August 26, 2005

Routers
Something about my setup that you might want to know: I left the D-Link router in place, just as Verizon installed it. I don't, though, connect my computers directly to it, but instead use an additional router. I took my Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Broadband Router and unplugged the connection to the cable modem. (For now, the cable modem is switched to be connected to another router and provides open WiFi to guests in my home and serves as a backup.) I connected one of the LAN jacks on the D-Link not to a personal computer but rather to a cable that goes to the WAN jack of the Linksys (using the cable from the basement to the 3rd floor). I didn't need to make any changes to the Linksys settings: I have it request a DHCP address from the D-Link just as it did to Comcast through the cable modem. The D-Link uses IP addresses inside my house that start with 192.168.0.? and the Linksys uses 192.168.1.?, so I can easily get to the D-Link settings page from browsers running on PCs connected to the Linksys without any confusion or special settings. Since I already had a wireless router this saved me from needing to pay the extra money for one from Verizon or needing to locate the Verizon-provided router out of the basement in a more WiFi-friendly place. I also am not as concerned as some seem to be about Verizon having access to a router protecting my local network (if they recommend upgrades and you need to download new firmware with unknown capabilities) -- I have another router blocking things after it. I've seen with Verizon DSL that they like to "help" you with special software on your PC, etc., that may (or may not) be helpful to non-techies but I'd rather have more control myself over my configuration. I can always run a PC directly connected to the D-Link for diagnostic purposes if they need it. The D-Link connects by PPPoE and needs to be set up differently (it is similar to DSL setups, as I wrote before). Apparently, the back-to-back routers don't seem to slow things down much, since I'm getting the full speed they specify from Verizon.

I understand that some users disconnect the D-Link router (and save it -- it comes bundled with the installation) and connect their own router. For example, some people have Linksys units with wireless that they find to have stronger signals in their homes than the D-Link. Apparently using other routers (connecting using PPPoE) works. However, as I understand it, that practice is not officially supported by Verizon which claims to use special diagnostic software in the routers. (From their FAQ: "Your router also contains special diagnostic software that can help us trouble-shoot and correct problems should you experience trouble with your Internet Service. You will need to use the Verizon router with your FiOS Internet service.")

-Dan Bricklin, 15 September 2005

© Copyright 1999-2007 by Daniel Bricklin
All Rights Reserved.