Last Friday I had my Fios "Fiber to the Home" connection installed. This is that story.

I waited around the house for the Verizon guys to show up on my service installation day. They were supposed to arrive between 9 and 9:30 in the morning, but I incorrectly figured that they might arrive early.

At 11am, two techs, Craig and Mike, showed up at the house to do the inside install and get the connection running. They said the delay was due to an incorrect job order (or some such) at the Central Office. Apparently, the job was not scheduled properly even though they had been out to the house the day before to install the fiber line to the ONT. We ran into problems with this later, it seems.

Anyway, they went about the business of running a new CAT5 line from my computer room directly to the ONT and powering it up. This new cable among the many others already in the floor below the computer room would supply the full bandwidth of the new connection tothe rest of the home network.

There are several lights on the inside of the ONT (Optical Network Terminal) that show its status. After "turning up" the ONT, it took a few moments for these lights to come on. Mike tested the voice connection by plugging his tester handset into the standard RJ-11 port on the ONT, and he heard a dialtone. Good news, or so we thought.

I'll take a moment now to describe a few things inside the ONT. There are four voice line ports, which is plenty for our house, since we don't use any of them. (There's a voice line on the Verizon account, but we use VoIP from Vonage for telephone service.) There is obviously an RJ-45 jack for the CAT5 network cable. And perhaps surprisingly to some (but not to me) there is a jack for video. I'm not sure what type the jack is, just that the connection light in the ONT was lit for this port.

Moving inside, they drilled a hold in the floor for the new port, rand the new CAT5 wire through the drop ceiling in the basement, punched down the ends and voila! House cabling installed. Craig plugged a patch cord into the new wall socket and connected it to the D-Link DI-604 router that Verizon supplied. Another patch cord hung from a LAN port on the router, and I plugged it into my notebook. I rebooted the notebook (which I usually keep in Hibernate mode) to get the hard network port online, and switched off the power to the Wi-Fi antenna.

Let their be no misunderstanding about my intent here - The notebook has less software installed to it than any other computer in our home network, and it has a fresh disk image on a hidden partition. If the required Verizon software was truly invasive, I would just wipe the computer clean.

We plodded through the software prompts in the Verizon software, which were expectedly tedious. After several screens of ridiculous self-install information (plug your router in here, use this network port. Uh, hello? Already did that!) the software started to "test" the router.

This is the part where the instalation would always fail.

Craig seemed to know the password for the router web UI, so we went in through there to check the settings. I could connect to the router fine, but the router couldn't connect via PPPoE, even though the connection between the router and the ONT was solid. Drat.

After a couple tries we called up the Fios Service Center. The operator had us go through all of the same junk again. Many times. She was completely unable to recognize that not only had we done what she asked us to do before we got on the phone, but then after we humored her in doing it two more times, we were ready to move on. Incompetent? I don't know. Certainly not trained enough to handle knowing when to escalate a call.

I am a firm believer that I should get a password that lets me past the first level operator just so I don't have to teach them how netowrking works. At one pont, this operator said to me, "Can you see the router configuration page in your browser?" Yes. "Look for the DHCP settings and we'll see if they are configured properly." Well, if I can connect to the router, they must be working, true? Gah!

After a while on hold from her, we were talking to a technician somewhere else (His name - LJ? RJ? PJ?) who reported that there was an issue with a switch somewhere (isn't that always the way?) and that he'd have to get back to us when they got it sorted out. At this point, Mike decided to go tear out my copper line, and then he and Craig went for lunch (I assume, since they hadn't eaten anything while they were at the house, and it was already 2-something). I may be confusing things here a little but because we waited two hours for a callback from the LJ guy.

When they came back, cell phones were flying. Their boss, Maureen (aka "Mo") had been calling every 10 minutes the whole time they were doing the install. I guess she or they called some guy, Scott, who is a bigwig at Verizon. He was on the case, and soon there was going to be a conference call concerning my case. Weird.

Apparently, there was some problem with the way the work order was pushed through the computers. The computers at Verizon work very oddly. They have these "order" things that have some codes attached to them, apparently typed in by someone who issues orders. When certain systems see these codes, it enables features in certain other hardware, and this all makes the system work. Well, I guess that my order didn't have the right codes in it, because the data line was never activated on my ONT.

Moreover, fixing the issue caused problems. At one point, Mike got a call from a guy at the Central Office (it's only four blocks away) who said that he got a strange new order. His work sheet said to remove the jumper he had just installed for the fiber to my house and replace it with one for copper. He had called to make sure that this was what was supposed to happen. Good thing, because it totally wasn't. I mean, I didn't have copper wiring to my house any more!

During all of this hassle, there was a big deal made about one of the guys going home. I personally didn't care if they both stayed or one stayed, as long as someone was working on it. But it seemed that Verizon managemnt didn't want to pay both guys to sit and wait for the unprepared twits to wire the network correctly. Maybe that's the right call from a business perspective - I'm not sure. Seems like a poor way to treat your employees, though.

Around 6:30, Mike was still at the house and the connection finally went online. There were wires all over the computer room, but it was working. We tested it from another computer by linking the new router though my old router's switch, and it worked fine.

Unfortunately, we were already off the line with the service center when we did the speed test. I'm paying for 15Mbps, and it seems I'm topping out at 5. I need to call them to fix this problem.

After Mike left, I unplugged the D-Link router and chucked it. I built a new patch cable to run from the newly installed port over to my good router, the Linksys WRT54GP2, and popped it into the WAN port. My whole netowrk came up without changing the settings.

So here's the key if you're a Verizon DSL customer: Pitch the Fios disk. Set your router to PPPoE, and put your username and password into the login settings. If you're using your router for DSL, it's already set up like this. Then you're done. Avoid the stupid installation videos.

In all, the techs who did the home install would have been done in a half hour if the people in Verizon's network operations knew what they were doing at all. I appreciate Verizon's commitment to keeping the guys on-site until the system was working. Mike and Craig were friendly and professional during the entire installation process.

Hopefully the self-install kit improves because it's somewhat poor. Apart from that, my connection is now pretty top-notch.