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.