I get FIOS installed today. What's that wooshing sound? That's the sound my massive bandwidth makes! Heh.

The installation was certainly amusing. He asked to see where the line needed to go in the house. I showed him the server closet, and then another room full of spare parts. He stared for a little bit, then asked "Are you into computers or something?"

He later asked what I did. I mentioned something about Linux... he had never heard of it. I tried explaining that it was an OS just like Windows or a Mac with OS X, then told him I did Linux at work. At which point he said "So you work for Linux?"

Hah. Well, something like that.

After he got everything setup, we went out to my laptop to try it all out. I was able to connect to the DLink Router they setup with no problem, the next thing he wanted to do was configure the router. He told me to do it since I could probably do it faster than him anyway :-)

So, the first thing we did is get rid of the PPPoe, and go straight to "Dynamic". I'd of course prefer a static IP, but dynamic with dyndns (I use dnsexit, actually) isn't too far off.

I went with the 15Mb down / 2Mb up... and I seem to be able to get fairly close to that on the so called "bandwidth testing sites". Now for the real test... downloading an ISO. I tried a .edu site, and was seeing a little over 1.3MB/s down. Which is a bit closer to 10Mb, rather than 15... probably a limitation of the server I was pulling it from.

So is it worth it to get the full 15Mb, over the 5Mb service, for the additional $10/month? I'm not sure ATM, I'll think about it over the next month or so and see what all I download. I certainly see a difference in downloading files. Maybe I'll just do it to annoy the AT&T COO who said this:

"In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet capability is irrelevant because the backbone doesn't transport at those speeds," he told the conference attendees. Stephenson said that AT&T's field tests have shown "no discernable difference" between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone."

I would just like to say that the above is untrue, as I believe I've just proven... and I reiterate my stance that he's simply jealous because he's stuck at lousy download speeds of DSL :-)

Yeah, the download speed isn't always going to be hitting the full 15Mb it looks like... the upload is where I really see huge differences between that and my old comcast connection (I was getting 384k up). Though, that said -- it sounds like you're getting 6Mb from Comcast, I was only getting 4Mb.

Verizon offers 5Mb down / 2Mb up for about $35 a month, 15/2 for $45, and 30/2 for something over $100. I have the 15/2 ATM.