joelmcclung

I live in the Washington DC metro area and got FiOS installed in late April. The two technicians who installed it said they were down from NYC. Apparently, there is a tremendous shortage of FiOS installers here in the DC-metro area, so they asked for volunteers from the NYC area to come down here for a two-month stint. They also said that they were going to roll FiOS out in the NYC area in the mid-to-late summer timeframe. The technicians who were down here were getting trained on how to do it so they would be ready up there. If you decide to get business FIOS for the static IPs, there are two things to be aware of: 1. A week or two after my installation, I found out that Verizon offers a D-Link DI-624 for their home service, and an Adtran 2405 (or 2600?) router for their business service. I ordered business service and they gave me a DI-624 (and billed me $65). It took me a few days beating my head against the wall trying to get it working before I got in touch with the right tech support person who told me I needed an Adtran router. They offered the Adtran 2405 for $300, and the 2600(?) for $700, I think. I got the 2405. 2. They say you need an Adtran router, but they (Verizon) configure it VERY strangely. They alias all of your static IPs on the WAN interface, and then set up a 10.10.10.X private network on the LAN side. Then, they map each of your static IP addresses to a corresponding private address. For example, if you have static IP addresses 1.2.3.24 through 1.2.3.30, they will map them to 10.10.10.24 through 10.10.10.30. They then tell the Adtran to send all traffic on all ports to the corresponding IP address. Essentially, they turn the Adtran router into a switch! There's no firewall capability whatsoever. Personally, I prefer to have a firewall sitting between the internet and my LAN. The LAN machines are semi-trusted, and the WAN (internet) is totally untrusted. The firewall should list specific specific ports that internet traffic can hit on my private LAN. They way Verizon sets it up, each machine with a static IP address is 100% responsibile for locking down each and every port. If you are behind a true firewall or router, you're semi-safe if you put a newly-installed Windows XP machine (pre-SP2) onto your LAN while you download all the patches. With the Verizon set up, if you configure a static IP address on that Windows machine and try to download patches, it will be SO infected before the patches are done downloading that I wouldn't trust it on the LAN side. I'd love to get the speed, but their business FiOS setup is not acceptable for me. I'm cancelling it tomorrow.