Readers of StationStops who live in the Tri-State area may have High-Speed Broadband Verizon FiOS Fiber Optic Internet available to their home. In Connecticut, it is available in Greenwich only. For New York, check this list. For New Jersey, check here. To check if Verizon FiOS is available to your home specifically, check the Verizon FiOS website.

I have had the service for 2 years, and I love it. It’s by far the fastest and most stable Internet connection I have ever had, if a bit pricey. By comparison, my last DSL connection was about 1.5 Mbps, my last cable connection was 8 Mbps – my FiOS connection is 25 Mbps(!)

Just as impressive is the fact that I can easily observe the advertised speed at home, at any time, day or night, with absolutely no fluctuation. This is not the case with Cable or DSL, where distance from a switching station, copper connection quality, interference, or neighborhood usage can all send your speeds downward – sometimes dramatically.

FiOS is a direct fiber optic connection to your home. There is no competition with neighbors – your broadband is yours – what you pay for is what you get – in my case, 25 Mbps, 24/7. And, in my experience, it goes down a lot less than my previous DSL and cable connections.

Just a note – although I think FiOS is great, I am on the internet a great deal, do internet development for a living, and also play multiplayer games on the internet which play better with faster speeds. That said, if you are mostly just an internet emailer and web browser, you might be far better off value-wise with something like the Cablevision Optimum Online Triple Play or even Verizon DSL.

However, there are some tips I wanted to share with you for getting the most out of your FiOS connection experience…

1. Change your DNS settings

The first and most important is a very significant and bizarre performance issue specific to Verizon FiOS which is easily fixed.

By default, your Verizon FiOS router will define two Verizon DNS servers which it will use to translate domain names into IP addresses. By default (at least on my router and some other customers), the DNS servers it chooses are VERY VERY SLOW, and you need to change them manually.

When you type in ‘http://www.stationstops.com’, and your router has never accessed that site before, it needs to ask some sort of authority at Verizon what the IP address associated with the domain name ‘StationStops.com’ is – after that, your computer will remember the IP for a while so it doesnt have to look it up every time.

I noticed that when I was surfing new sites with FiOS, that some sites would stall as the Firefox statusbar would read ‘Looking up newsite.com…’ – this indicated to me that it was waiting for a DNS request.

Sure enough, when I changed my windows network connection settings to use different Verizon DNS servers (I use 4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2 – ideally the second DNS server would be on a different network block, but I was lazy). Making this change made the ‘looking up…’ delays in Firefox completely disappear.

You can either do this in your router (leaving yoru computers network connection settings to get DNS server automatically from the router), or in your computer’s network connection settings.

2. Turn Off (or test and tweak) Internet/browser connection accelerators.

First off, if you have been using any type of connection accelerators to speed up your connection, in general you will probably want to turn them off, as they could actually *slow down* your performance.

One example is Fasterfox, an extension for Firefox which lets you tweak your Internet connection and browser settings to speed up sites, which I have used for years. As it turns out – for me anyway, Fasterfox actually slows down my browsing – even if it is set to ‘default’ (which is weird).

The easiest way for me to test this is to do an image search on Google Groups – only about half of the search result thumbnails will load right away – the others will stall (for a very long time) – this happens with some other sites as well, but not all. I cannot always reproduce it 100%, but I know that the problem *never* happens when I have FasterFox entirely disabled.

I also ran into some problems with some of the settings in the TweakVista utility, which I think mirrors a lot of the same settings as FasterFox. So I turned off the TweakVista Internet tweaks as well.

3. Install a download accelerator like Internet Download Manager.

This one will confound a lot of people who think that all download accelerators are mostly spyware snake oil, but stay with me.

With very high-speed connections like FiOS, you are going to have a problem reaching your best download speeds with a single connection to the remote site. This is known as the ‘long fat pipe’ problem, where the overhead of an especially long or ‘multiple-hop’ IP connection will prevent any single connection from reaching your top speeds you observe to, say, your Internet provider’s website (which typically is very close, network-wise, to your computer).

So, although you may be able to easily download a large file at 25 Mbps from Verizon.com, you may only be able to download at, say, 8 Mbps from a west coast or European website.

This is not an issue for peer-to-peer file sharing apps such as Bittorrent, which uses simultaneous connections to multiple peers, saturating your bandwidth – but how do you achieve the same effect with an FTP or HTTP download?

The answer is with a download accelerator/manager which knows how to create multiple connections to the same destination site, and how to download different segments of the same file simultaneously. In this way, it can saturate your connection to the remote host just like Bittorrent does with peers. When its done, there is a brief pause while it assembles all the downloaded parts into a single file.

Personally, I use Internet Download Manager. I have never done a comprehensive comparison of different software, but I know I did try a few, and Internet Download Manager worked so well I had no problem paying the $30 for it – its well worth the money. Its a one-time fee, and I was able to install it on multiple computers with the same key with no problems. Now its one of the first programs I install on any computer I buy.

A note about Wireless-N

Especially if you have a symmetrical 25 Mbps connection from Verizon FiOS (which I have but don’t recommend most people spend the extra money for – just get the regular 25 Mbps connection – the real-life upload speeds don’t impress me), you may be thinking about upgrading your wireless network in your home to 802.11n, as in practice an 802.11g connection cannot handle the full throughput of symmetrical 25 Mbps. In addition, you may have heard that Wireless-N has better range.

I thought these things too, so I attached a TrendNet 802.11n Access Point to my router. It indeed had better range and speed, but there was a big drawback. The problem is that on my Dell XPS m1330 notebook, using 802.11n instead of 802.11g causes a MASSIVE battery drain.

It is like night and day – and when you come down to it, although 802.11g cannot handle symmetrical 25 Mbps in practice, in everyday usage you are never saturating it anyway, so its really a solution in search of a problem, but YMMV. I suspect this will vary from chipset to chipset.

As for range, I just relocated the access point and set it to g-only. Problem solved.

Replacing your Verizon FiOS Wireless Router

My Verizon FiOS Wireless Router is actually a nice unit – it has plenty of advanced options and works fine.

However, if you have specific router needs unmet by your Verizon router, I have been able to replace it with a router of my choosing.

However, you will need to go into the new router’s settings and clone the MAC address of the original router, which is in the original routers settings as well as usually on a sticker on the unit. I was unable to use a different router without this step, but after that it was fine.

I should note that Verizon doesn’t necessarily condone this and they insist there are special communications used for reliability and troubleshooting which are only available in their routers. However, I never had any issue with using a different router, and the original worked fine when I put it back.

Setting Up A Web Server

Verizon FiOS will not allow you to operate a webserver on the standard port 80, but if you have a need for a personal web server for occasional use, you can change the router settings to serve your web server off a different port. Just port forward port 81 to your webserver’s port 80, and you should be good to go. If you need a domain name, there are settings for Dynamic DNS in the router settings which work fine.

I would recommend using Dynamic DNS if you have any need to reach your home network, as I have found Verizon FiOS IP addresses to not be very sticky if you reboot your router, and static IP addresses as usual are priced far out of reach to be of casual affordability.

If anyone has advice on how to make your dynamic IP more sticky – let me know in the comments!