Xlog

Verizon FIOS Speedtest

After almost a month after first ordering service with Verizon, our FIOS Internet connection was finally installed at work this morning.

As many of you know, FIOS is a PON or Passive Optical Network.  In laymans terms, FIOS utilizes an architecture where bandwidth is shared on the fiber for all customers on that loop. This isn’t so bad if there are just a few customers on that loop.  Cable providers utilize a similar Hybrid-fiber Coax architecture, but where a PON extends the fiber to the premise (FTTP), an HFC network does not.  The last portion of the network is coax, as the name implies.

PON does not suffer from the same interferers as a Hybrid-Fiber Coax network and generally has higher capacity than its coax counterpart.  In theory, this sounds pretty good and in practice FIOS works well.

Some informal bandwidth testing tonight yielded some great results. As you can see, at a maximum we achieved a little over 38Mbps down and 11.5Mbps upstream (we ordered a 50/20 business plan from Verizon). Testing was done on a MacBookPro running OS X 10.5.5 with Firefox 3.03, directly connected (100Mbps/Full-duplex) to a Netgear FVS114 router.

While we did not achieve a full 50 Mbps, that is the maximum our account should support,  we are please with close to 40Mbps.  The weak link here might actually be the FVS114 router.  We will try some additional testing tomorrow and see if we get a significant change.

For now, happy surfing at work!