[BC] FIOS comes to the Wilds of VA

[Chris Gebhardt]

Alan Peterson wrote:
> At long last, the cul-de-sac I live on in Northern Virginia finally had a Verizon FIOS lightpipe laid down under the sidewalk. 
> 
> For anyone who already has the service in their home, I've got two questions:
> 
> 1) How good is the RF immunity of the interface boxes and the indoor copper lines, specifically in the typical ham band frequencies between 1.8 and 147 MHz? Around my house now with its basic crapola wiring, my internet speed dips measurably when the rig is keyed.
> 
> 2) Isn't there an option you can ask for when ordering where the existing copper line to the street remains in place and connected for telephone service, should there be an extended power failure in one's locale that surpasses the life of the battery backup?
> 
> Verizon customer service reps haven't been much help outside of their flip-tab answer books, and they don't know how to transfer me to an engineer. Can anyone offer their experiences?
> 
> Alan Peterson KJ4IVD

Congrats on the FiOS arriving.  I had it installed as soon as it was 
available and have never looked back or regretted it.   It's way better 
than the old DSL I had.

As far as keeping the copper goes, I don't think it's an option.  They 
never removed the copper from my house, but the fiber enters on the 
opposite side.

It doesn't matter anyhow... once they cut you over to the fiber, you're 
on a different network than the POTS, so it's not just a trivial matter 
of switching back and forth.

The battery lasts 8 hours.   If that is a killer for you, you might want 
to look into a larger UPS from which you can supply the FiOS, or even a 
small generator (which may prove handy in an extended outage anyhow).

Chris Gebhardt
VIRTBIZ Internet Services
chris at virtbiz.com | (972) 485-4125