Santa's coming early this year

[cdru]

Service finally became available this morning in about the last 45 minutes. I know because I've been checking it about once an hour since I got up at 6. I signed up for the 15/2 plan, but seperated billing for data and phone as I'm looking forward to ditching Verizon's overpriced phone service for VoIP. Install date is set for the 19th.

Does anyone have any VoIP recommendations. Right now I leaning mostly towards Vonage. They seem to be the largest and most stable from what I've seen. It costs a little more, but their 911 integration also seems to be better then the norm.

 

[korsjs]

congrats, you will enjoy it. let me know if they are still giving away the five dollar movie coupon. it would be in your welcome package.

 

[cdru]

Well Installer Steve is on his way to my place. T-minus an hour or so...

 

[riffjim4069]

Well Installer Steve is on his way to my place. T-minus an hour or so...

Good luck on your install. Regarding VOIP, I've heard nothing but good things about Vonage, but have you looked into Verizon VoiceWing?

 

[cdru]

Yeah. They don't currently offer my exchange (or even area code) yet. My guess is that might change now that FiOS is available. My installer is here now and he just mentioned that Verizon "was partnering with Vonage or someone". I knew that VoiceWing wasn't an original Verizon service, rather just some other existing VoIP service rebadged.

 

[cdru]

Well, I give Verizon a 5 out of 10 for the install. The physical aspect went well. My installer was "training" if you want to call it that another guy so I think things went slower then they normally would. The fact that it was about 7 degrees out most of the time probably didn't help out a whole lot either. Once they got inside, that's when all the problems started.

It took them about an hour to get the ONT registered on the network. They tried multiple times with their laptop via a cell phone connection to get it registered and each attempt lasted about 15 minutes. It always failed. So they had to call someone and they finally got it registered.

Then we tried to move my DSL profile over to a FiOS profile. Firing up Firefox, I learned that Firefox is too old to use with their system. Well, actually it's not IE. Switching over to IE, we get to a point where I have to enter the primary account name to perform the profile move. I enter my primary address and password, and it says it's incorrect. I try again. It kicks me out. We repeated this last couple of steps many times with a variety of different usernames and passwords that VOL tech support was giving us. No one had any clue what they were doing and I was starting to get a little perturbed. Finally it worked. Well, sort of.

As the installer is packing up, he says I have to call VOL support to get my e-mail sub accounts switched over. So I call and get bounced around between Encore support and VOL DSL support, neither know who I'm suppose to talk with. Finally I get to the Fiber Solutions Center and he says he can help. I had to create 6 dummy accounts that they then "repoint" my old addresses to. He says the guy that does the repointing too has a couple of other things to get to first and it would take a couple of hours to complete. That was yesterday at 6PM. Today at 8AM, things are still not done.

And no Korsjs, they aren't handing out movie coupons.

 

[jmcgee_jr]

But but but you still have 15/2 I would cry for that. This is case and point why I use hotmail I never have to mess with any email servers ever again.

 

[cdru]

I called the FSC (Fiber Solution Center...aka tech support) back this morning. They said the "couple of hours" really was 24-48 but that the ticket was still open.

It is definitely nice having 15/2. However, it's almost anti-climatic. I have all this speed and nothing to use it with. I queued up a few things on VOL's newsserver and it tops out at around 350KB/sec. Before with my 1500/768 DSL I would only get about 180KB/sec and doing anything else on the internet would drag. Now I'm using less then 1/5th my total capacity. Sigh. It sucks to be in this predicament.