Kit's Blog

Fudge for FIOS

     Today I got to experience the BLAZING FAST SPEED OF FIOS!!! ...Almost. I went to Mitch's house (because there was no school today) and watched the wrap-up of the install and helped with the router configuration . The bummer was that despite the fact that I brought my own comp, I had to crimp the ethernet cables myself (which is a painfully slow process) and then when we plugged into the router we found that when I plugged in, the internet died. We fiddled around and eventually just re-crimped the cables very, VERY carefully, and got both computers up and running. But we quickly ran into another problem:
     The router Verizon provides with the FIOS service is completely and 100% incapable of load distribution. If one of our computers downloaded at the full 15mbps, all other computers lost all connectivity. When we made simultanious requests we were rewarded with perfect 50/50 distriubution, but we were working on separate things, so that wasn't useful at all. What we ended up doing was bringing down a linksys router and setting it up. Then we really started to burn rubber.
     Unfortunately that was about six o'clock and so that was seven hours after I'd gotten to mitch's house. Most of which had been work on cleaning his basement and getting FIOS up and running properly. When all that was done we started doing stress testing to see how much of the alleged 15mbps we were getting. It turned out to be about 16mbps top speed max (which was 1 more mbps then we had bargained for, so AWESOME!), but we couldn't get any upload stress tests. Then we spent an infuriating half-hour testing his no-ip account (which was in perfect working order, but the person we were testing with couldn't see it for whatever odd reason (as a side note to Mitch, yes it's up and running. Sorry I had to delete so much of the image to protect what you're running)) and then I had to go home. So basically I got to look at it, and feel a little bit of it, but not really. I'll be back! AND I WANT IT TOO!

Note: EMERGENCY MESSAGE from MCPS.k12.md.us: 2/24/2005 at 11:09 PM --
An announcement about school operations for Friday, Feb. 25 will be made at 5:00 a.m. on Feb. 25.