Closer

Accept the virus!

Good Cactus.

So I just set up mobile blogging and have all of there extra messages to waste. Because of that I wanted to see if this would work.

So here is a shot of the equipment Verizon put up in my closet. It is the Optical Network Terminal, which connects the phone line to the fiber, and runs coax to the tv's and the router. That way we have internet and TV, along with no more copper phone lines. It also has a battery backup for about eight hours, in case power goes out so that you can still make phone calls, since fiber needs electricity to work. So the coax splits, connecting the set top boxes and the router to the ONT, and also allowing the set top box to communicate over the internet through the router to get programming information. And soon I will screw around with this some more to tweak some more speed out of these nice shiny fibers.

So it's been a while, even though I know I said I would post some speed results once the service was up and running. Anyway, here are the new results after our fancy new fiber optics lines got lit up:



So far the service has been excellent. My phone lines don't crackle anymore when it rains because they switched it over to the fiber as well, instead of moldy old copper, and the connection is crazy fast. The only problem is that the router they give doesn't have a very big NAT table. What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you, along with my attempts to fix it.

The NAT table in the router keeps track of all the connections to various places around the interweb. If you take something that uses a lot of connections, ie torrents, it quickly floods the NAT table and no more connections are possible. This means that anything that is already connected, if your playing WoW or downloading something, will stay connected, but anything more, say trying to browse to a website, won't work, or take forever, or usually just time out. I'm pretty sure Verizon knows about this, and just wants to keep people from using their fat fiber pipes to download a hundred gigabytes a day. Of course, that is the exact reason why I wanted this service, so I went looking for some kind of workaround.

The solution it seems is to connect the verizon router to our router, switch the verizon router into bridge mode so that it doesn't really do anything, connect the computers to our router and enjoy internet access, then take a cat5 cable and connect our router back into the verizon router, so that it can give an ip address to the set top boxes. That way Video on Demand and the channel guide still work. This is where the problem comes up. I can get our router working, but I'm having a hell of a time getting the TV parts to work as well. I think I'm just not moving fast enough after releasing the IP address. But I'm getting tired of calling Verizon over and over to force an IP release.

So soon I will try again, and hopefully get it all working. The more people that get connected the more people there are contributing to the solution. Probably have some pictures of blinking lights and things soon.

So today is the day we are finally getting Verizon FIOS service. Supposedly it's going to take most of the day, which means I will be sitting around the apartment all day, probably reading a book while all kinds of fancy optical equipment gets installed. If I can get a hold of Ashley's digital camera, I might follow the guy around and take pictures of everything. If that doesn't work, I guess I could try my cell phone's camera, but those aren't that great. Anyway, for comparison purposes, here is the best out of the five speed tests I ran this morning on my old Verizon DSL, and later when everything is up and running I'll post another one.