[wplug] Verizon FIOS experience with Linux?

[DK]

Eric,

Having visited your home to pickup that give-away hardware awhile
back, I can understand why you had the service delivered underground.
Did Verizon pay for the whole deal?

Dave Kraus

On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 11:59 AM, Eric Cooper <ecc at cmu.edu> wrote:
> 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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