The Verizon techs just left, having installed the 30/5 pipe as promised. Speed tests confirmed download speeds in the high-20Mbit/s range, though upload speeds were stuck at 2.5Mbit/s, not the specified 5Mbit/s. However, I ran two simultaneus speed tests to different servers, and both turned in 2.5Mbit/s, so I’m satisfied my pipe is as big as they say.

A tech (Carl) arrived very early. The scheduled install time was between 1 and 5 PM; he arrived at 10:30 AM. I quickly threw on some underwear and let him in. He did his thing for a few hours, then around 2 PM it came time to wire up the router. He had another tech with him (Rodney) who seemed to be doing the datacomm bits. Setup was pretty painless, though time consuming.

The techs installed a Verizon-branded Actiontek MI424WR wireless router. They used the coax wiring in my townhouse to connect the router to the box they attached to my house. To simplify setup, I plugged my laptop directly into their router, even though I had no intention of using it that way. They had some software on a thumb drive they wanted to install, which goes through setting up a verizon.net account and installing a ton of crap. I opted out of all the crap, and only begrudgingly created a verizon.net account.

As soon as the techs left, I started working on the router. First, I enabled the Telnet configuration environment and turned off the wireless. Second, I moved its LAN settings from 192.168.1/24 over to 192.168.2/24, since 192.168.1/24 is already my internal LAN. I then hooked up wintermute, my OpenBSD firewall/router box, to one of the LAN ports on the Verizon router, updated wintermute’s “wan” IP to 192.168.2.2, pointed its gateway and DNS at the Verizon router, and voila. I made wintermute the DMZ host to simplify configuration.

Why didn’t I just yank that router and use wintermute? Two reasons. First, wintermute doesn’t have the magical coax port the Verizon router uses. Second, Verizon says they want you to use that router coz it has special remote diagnostic stuff in it. Whatever. Fine w/ me.

I quickly ran a speed test now that wintermute was in the loop, and got horrible (worse than DSL) performance. The problem? I still had wintermute configured with altq settings assuming DSL bandwidth. I quickly opened the floodgates and ran the perf tests again. There was clearly a slowdown (mid-20’s instead of high-20’s) and wintermute’s interrupt time jumped to 60%, but it’s good enough for now. Eventually I’ll need to replace wintermute with a box that can handle the full 30Mbits/s throughput.

At this point, I’m very happy with FiOS. Once my friend comes over to try some BitTorrents, I’ll know if Verizon is going to do any bullshit traffic shaping to cockblock me from using all the bandwidth I paid for. Best for them if they’re not…