[wplug] Verizon FIOS experience with Linux?

Eric Cooper ecc at cmu.edu
Sat Jun 28 11:59:03 EDT 2008


I finally got FIOS installed and I'm very happy with it so far.
I'm getting about 14600 Kbps down, 2250 up.

The physical install was the hardest part.  First, it got rescheduled
twice due to lack of coordination among Verizon, their subcontractor
who does the trenching from street to house, and the PA OneCall people
who flag buried utilities.  Once the subcontractor was done, the
Verizon tech still had to spend about 8 hours, including getting the
cable through a stone wall into my basement crawl space, and running
the cable on 3 poles along the street.

He installed coax (MOCA) between the ONT and the ActionTec router
before I had a chance to tell him I wanted Cat5. (MOCA is installed by
default, and required if you want FIOS TV service.  If you want Cat5,
you're supposed to request it when you first schedule the
installation.)

In its default setup, the ActionTec router has WiFi enabled, acts as a
DHCP client over the WAN, and provides DHCP service and NAT routing to
the LAN side. The tech didn't insist on connecting a Windows PC, and
everything worked fine with my homebrew Linux firewall.

As soon as he left, I disabled the WiFi and reconfigured the ActionTec
simply to bridge between the WAN and LAN.  That let my Linux router do
DHCP directly to Verizon.

Although that worked fine, it bothered me to have a useless extra hop
between my firewall and the network. So I called Verizon tech support
and asked to have the ONT connection changed from MOCA to Cat5.
(I reminded them of the multiple reschedules and blamed it on them :-)

They sent out a very helpful technician the next day.  Although the
wiring change is trivial, the ONT has to be switched from MOCA to Cat5
from the central office.  That took an extra day because their
provisioning system was down most of the day (yesterday), but by this
morning it had been switched over.

I'd like to use the ActionTec as an access point elsewhere in my
network, but only if I can put something like OpenWRT or DD-WRT on it.
I haven't found any way to do that yet.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u


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