The FCC recently conducted a study of some of the top broadband ISPs in the country and measured customers’ actual bandwidth as compared to what the ISPs advertised. FiOS really came out on top.

The report is available on the FCC site. The bottom line, though, is that Verizon FiOS averaged nearly 120% of advertised speed (i.e., more than was advertised) and Cablevision was between 50% and 75% of advertised speeds. Latency (ping) was also heavily in FiOS’s favor.

FCC - Fios vs Cablevision

More than 78,000 consumers volunteered to participate in this study and a total of approximately 9,000 consumers were selected as potential participants and were supplied with specially configured routers. The data in this Report is based on a statistically selected subset of those consumers—approximately 6,800 individuals—and the measurements taken in their homes during March 2011. The participants in the volunteer consumer panel were recruited with the goal of covering ISPs within the U.S. across all broadband technologies, although only results from three major technologies—DSL, cable, and fiber-to-the-home—are reflected in
this Report. To account for network variances across the United States, volunteers were recruited from the four Census Regions: Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. Within each Census Region, consumers were selected to represent broadband performance in three typical speed ranges: less than 3 Mbps, between 3 and 10 Mbps, greater than 10 Mbps.

The testing methodology itself required innovation on both the consumer, or “client,” side and on the ISP, or “server,” side. The server-side infrastructure, which comprised reference measurement points that were distributed geographically across nine different U.S. locations, was made available to SamKnows for the project by M-Lab, a non-profit organization that supports Internet research activities. Each consumer participant’s broadband performance was measured from a hardware gateway in his or her household to the off-net test node that had the lowest latency to the consumer’s address.

On the “client” side of the test, consumers self-installed a measurement gateway that was provided by SamKnows. These gateways, or “Whiteboxes,” were installed between the consumer’s computer and Internet gateway and came pre-loaded with custom testing software. The “Whitebox” software was programmed to automatically perform a periodic suite of broadband measurements while excluding the effects of consumer equipment and household broadband activity. This approach permitted a direct measure of the broadband service an ISP delivered to a consumer’s household.

Anyone who’s experienced both Cablevision and Verizon can probably corroborate these results. Unless Cablevision significantly improves their services (DVR/TV as well as Internet), at the same price there’s no way I’d go back to Cablevision; I’d even stick with Verizon if it meant spending $10-$20 more per month, the service is that much better.

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

I started college around when Napster was getting big. Between Napster and the ability to browse other students’ shared files, I downloaded plenty of MP3s, mostly due to the novelty of being able to get one-off songs that I’d never otherwise pay for. Songs like AC/DC’s “Big Balls,” which I’d never heard before, but which I noticed hundreds of people had in their collections, so I downloaded it and laughed as Bon Scott dragged out a double entendre for about 3 minutes.

In the years since then I’ve purchased lots of CDs, many of them due to having downloaded the MP3 years earlier. I’m certainly not an audiophile, but I can hear MP3 compression artifacts in anything encoded in “joint stereo” or under 192 kbps, so I usually bought the CD so I could create a pristine rip with my own settings. I haven’t bought every album, only the ones I really liked – one of the things that made MP3 downloading so novel was the ability to get a single track rather than having to buy an entire CD of crap, which is what the music industry was trying to force everyone to do.

A few companies tried over the years to sell individual MP3s, but nobody really had much success until Apple rolled out the iTunes music store. Apple succeeded for a few reasons, but I think one of the most important was the simplicity of the pricing model: $0.99 for a single track, or $10 for a full album. No subscription fees or any of that annoying crap, just pay once and you own it. Yeah, there was annoying DRM, but 95% of people don’t care about that.

I happen to be one of the 5% that does care about that. There were ways to strip the DRM but that was already too annoying for me, plus I hated iTunes (still do) and didn’t own an iPod, so this wasn’t very appealing to me. But on a more basic level, I already owned almost all of the CDs I wanted. When new albums were released, I could usually grab them (in CD form) online for around $15 shipped. Compared to Apple’s $10 for a DRM-laden AAC, this was a no-brainer for me – a physical copy of the disc to serve as a permanent backup, and the ability to rip the entire album at any bitrate I wanted.

Fast-forward to 2011. I have an iPhone now and so I’m stuck with iTunes (which also sells DRM-free MP3s now), but I still don’t buy music from Apple. In the intervening years I’ve come to realize that I just find $0.99 per track overpriced. There’s a price I’ll pay for a song, greater than zero, but less significantly than $0.99. The last few albums I’ve bought have been $3.99 specials on Amazon, most recently Foo Fighters Wasting Light last week. 11 tracks for $4; about $0.36 per track. The CD version of this album normally sells for $9.99; the MP3 version normally sells for $7.99. For $9.99 you get a physical item shipped to you to do whatever you want – rip to MP3, lend to a friend, sell in a yard sale, donate to a library. If you get the MP3 version, you get it instantly and save $2, but lose all the other stuff. I don’t know if Amazon lets you redownload stuff you’ve purchased, so maybe you don’t need the physical medium in the event of a HD failure. But for $2 more I’d rather have the disc.

What got me thinking about this is the NY Times paywall. I love the NY Times and apparently by their measure qualify as a “heavy user,” someone who reads more than 20 articles a month. I probably read 5 to 10 stories a day. I’ve found it’s pretty easy to bypass their paywall – I’m sure they realize it’s trivial, but most people won’t bother – but I do feel kind of dirty doing it, and it’s kind of annoying. I was thinking I wouldn’t mind paying for it, but certainly not their ridiculous prices. For one thing they have ridiculous pricing distinctions depending on whether you’re just reading online, on an iPhone, or an iPad. Who cares? If you’re paying for the content you should be able to view it on any medium. You’re paying for the CONTENT! $3.75/week for “nytimes.com and Smartphone” or $8.75/week for “All access” are the options and both of them are horrendous.

How about this: fund your account with $20. Each article you read debits your account $0.01 to $0.05 depending on age (stories older than 30 days shouldn’t cost as much as today’s news – I mean, you couldn’t give yesterday’s paper away for free on the street). When your balance gets below $5 it auto-debits $20 again. You can keep all the rules you have about referrals from Twitter & Facebook being “free” but that seems kind of silly. Maybe people who pay get a more pleasant experience while freeloaders get bombarded with ads. Paid users should also be able to see a full report of every article they’ve “purchased” and the date.

I guess my point is that I wouldn’t mind paying for this content, but it’s overpriced. I understand that people need to be paid, but when CDs were $20, I didn’t buy any. When they dropped to $10, I bought plenty. If the NY Times is $200/year, I’m not going to pay for it. If it’s $40/year, I might. If it’s $20/year I’d definitely pay just to assuage my conscience. I want the NY Times to continue to exist and I understand someone has to pay the reporters and everyone else involved, but I’m not paying $200/year for it. I have a price in my head, what I think it’s worth. If you’re not near that, I’m not paying. A year ago my DVD player died and I wanted to get a PS3 for use as a BluRay player, but there was no way I was paying $300 for it, even though it’s probably a fair price. If it were $150 I would have snatched it up, it just was not worth $300 to me. In the end I bought a $50 Sony upscaling DVD player.

The NYTimes has overpriced itself as well, so I’m going with the cheaper alternative – bypassing the paywall and viewing the content anyway. They could tighten up the paywall, and maybe I’d find a way around it, or maybe I’d just get my news elsewhere, in which case we both lose. If there was a “name your own price” way to make it work, everyone would win.

I’m not sure why these guys operate this way – they’re more than happy to lose me as a customer and then throw huge discounts at me to get me back. If they’d just give me a good price I’d love not to have to go through this rigmarole. But after being with Cablevision for 2 months I checked Verizon’s pricing and it beat my current deal with Cablevision.

FiOS digital voice with number ported for free; 25/25 Mbps internet; HMDVR free “forever” plus a second HD STB, Showtime, Movie Channel and Flix. Since I already had the battery thing installed last time I had FiOS they gave me a fair discount. Basically the whole package for $87/month + tax, price locked for 2 years, no contract. Not as great of a deal as I’d had with FiOS originally, but it’s pretty good, and FiOS’s service is definitely better than Cablevision’s. I’ve heard Cablevision was rolling out their “DVR plus” service with all programs recorded “in the cloud” rather than on the actual box, but it’s been two months and I haven’t heard of it coming to Long Island. So basically 2 years later Cablevision’s service is exactly the same while Verizon has iPhone apps to control the DVR and use the phone as a remote, plus DVR that’s much faster and just generally better service.

On a side note, I noticed tonight I was having problems trying to stream Netflix to my Wii. I tried loading netflix.com on my laptop and that also didn’t work, it said “couldn’t find server movies.netflix.com.” I tested this via dig on my linux box and sure enough, movies.netflix.com isn’t resolving against the default Cablevision nameserver (167.206.3.206) – getting a SERVFAIL:

[evan@lunix ~]$ dig movies.netflix.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3 <<>> movies.netflix.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 17569
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;movies.netflix.com.            IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
movies.netflix.com.     232     IN      CNAME   merchweb-frontend-1502974957.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com.

;; Query time: 2129 msec
;; SERVER: 167.206.3.206#53(167.206.3.206)
;; WHEN: Sun Apr 24 01:23:58 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 103

I tried the same query against Google's nameserver (8.8.8.8) and it resolves correctly:

[evan@lunix ~]$ dig movies.netflix.com @8.8.8.8

; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_5.3 <<>> movies.netflix.com @8.8.8.8
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 43718
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;movies.netflix.com.            IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
movies.netflix.com.     300     IN      CNAME   merchweb-frontend-1502974957.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com.
merchweb-frontend-1502974957.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com. 39 IN A 174.129.220.6

;; Query time: 34 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Sun Apr 24 01:37:26 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 119

I set my router to resolve against 8.8.8.8 rather than whatever Cablevision provides and now it works. I'm not sure if this is related to the big EC2 disaster of the past few days but it looks more like Cablevision's fault than Amazon's or Netflix's.

Somehow this site became the top Google result for two different searches, “Shogun2.dll appcrash” and “fedora 14 gnome3″. My theory is that Google’s indexing the referring keywords listed in the widget on the right, causing a snowball effect. But the rise in traffic this year has been dramatic, especially for a site really about nothing.

Traffic 2011-02-01 to 2011-04-08

I mentioned in a previous post that I got the TP-Link TL-WR841ND 802.11n wifi router and it solved the speed problems I was noticing with wifi connections since going from FiOS to Cablevision. This seems to be the case still, however I’ve now had another problem with the TP router. Basically, wireless becomes unusable and the web UI becomes inaccessible. The SSID still shows up but I can’t get an IP address. When accessing it from the wired LAN via a browser, the connection times out – apparently whatever’s going on inside the router is also crashing its internal webserver.

Power-cycling the router resolved the issue both times it occurred (most recently tonight), but twice is two times too many. Tonight I downloaded and installed DD-WRT v24-sp2 and configured it. It only took a few minutes – I was pretty impressed with dd-wrt – though I was surprised not to see SNMP monitoring included. Not sure if I missed it in the UI but I assumed it would be under “Services,” and I didn’t see it there. I tried snmpwalk against the router and it returned nothing, so it’s not on by default.

Anyway, hopefully dd-wrt will give me better luck than the native TP-Link firmware. It seems to be a good router hardware wise, but crashing every few days negates that.

Update: April 19, 2011: I’ve had DD-WRT running for a few weeks now on the TP-Link router and it’s been great. No reboots required. For some reason DD-WRT doesn’t seem to have SNMP available, at least not through the web UI, but other than that it’s far better than the default TP-Link software.

Optimum Boost advertises 30 Mbps down, 5 Mbps up. Here’s a speed test I just ran at Ookla’s SpeedTest.net:

(My desktop is plugged into the router, the router is plugged into the Arris cablemodem.)

Here’s one of the last speed tests I did with Verizon, on 2/15. I had the 25/15 internet package:

(Desktop was plugged into 8-port Linksys 100 Mbit switch, the switch was plugged into the FiOS/ActionTec router.)

Verizon’s upload is much better than Cablevision’s, as you can see. Most people probably won’t notice it, but I do. Another thing to consider is that the FiOS router has pretty good WiFi built in. I got pretty good speeds using 802.11g on my laptop upstairs connected to the FiOS router downstairs. With Cablevision I went back to my old Netgear WGR614v7 router that I’d bought in 2009 after my trust Linksys WAP54G AP had died (at that point I was using my Linux box as router/NAT). The WGR614v7 is pretty crappy. The UI is fine and I guess for basic usage it’s acceptable, but the antenna is pretty small and the signal was very weak. When I connected 6-7 devices to it (Wii, 2 laptops, Mac Mini, 2 iPhones, Kindle) it would randomly not work on one of them. Rebooting the router fixed it, for a while. Somewhere in the logging facility of the router I saw an out-of-memory error. The kicker was that we’d get errors in the browser randomly when loading pages, and wifi speeds were pretty lousy – 10 Mbps down on the 30 Mbps Optimum connection.

I decided to right this wrong and spring for a new WiFi router. After some quick checking of Newegg I found the TP-LINK TL-WR841ND 802.11n router for $25 with free shipping and a free 802.11n USB adapter (TL-WN727N). Seemed like a no-brainer. I got it, set it up in under 10 minutes, plugged the N adapter into my wife’s laptop and can easily max the 30 Mbps cable connection from upstairs now. My laptop is still using G and the speeds & signal are pretty good. The TP-Link has 2 antennae and both are much larger than the Netgear’s single antenna; I can get a strong signal outside on my deck on the opposite side of the house from the router in the basement.

As I expected/feared, Cablevision still blocks port 80 so I had to move my site to external hosting. I signed up with JustHost.com, which has (supposedly) unlimited storage and bandwidth transfer for ~$5/month. Not happy about their DNS handling, and that my 404 pages are apparently filled with ads & popups now, but with the discount code I found it came to about $42 for a year of hosting. Not bad.

Still cleaning up, hopefully all the existing links will work. WordPress’s import function is pretty good but I wasn’t able to pull the attachments off the old server (due to the port 80 block).

At least this seems way faster than my old Athlon box.

Edit: Ping times have gotten much better since the move:

I switched to FiOS in December, 2009, and I was pretty apprehensive, having been a Cablevision customer for many years. I really had no problem with Cablevision’s service, I just thought their pricing was much too high in the face of the new competition (and deals) Verizon was offering. I ended up going with Verizon due to their awesome deal, but now it’s almost a year later and I can’t imagine going back to Optimum. It’ll probably come down to price when the current promo pricing I have with Verizon ends, but if the price was equal then no contest – I’d stick with FiOS.

So our Exchange server is located in our office building. This made sense at the time because that’s where the users are. Over time though, this has proved problematic for a few reasons. Primarily, our office is certainly not a datacenter and doesn’t offer the amenities of one – clean, reliable power, and redundant cooling. In an average year we lose power probably 10-15 times, often for an hour or more. The rest of our production environment is hosted in a top-tier datacenter, so after a while I started to wonder why our Exchange server wasn’t there, and making plans to move it there. Oh, and did I mention I’m not an Exchange admin in any sense of the term? I just inherited the Exchange server about 2 months ago.

The first step was to setup a VPN between the office and the datacenter so that users in the office would be able to connect seamlessly to the Exchange server once it was moved. This turned out to be relatively easy. The next step was basically to move the Exchange server. This originally seemed like it would be an easy thing to do — having a long history with PostgreSQL I figured I could do essentially a “dump and restore” – run some command that would backup contents of the mail database to a file and then restore it to a new machine. Well, I quickly learned that wasn’t possible, at least not given the factors involved.

Microsoft suggests two ways of moving an Exchange server to new hardware: 1) replacing a machine in-place with another one that takes its name and doing a restore, and 2) setting up the new server “next to” the old one and moving mailboxes over one at a time. I ruled out the first method because it seemed like a total crapshoot with no easy “rollback” mechanism. Plus I had no idea how long it would take to do a restore of our Exchange server – total mailbox size at the time was over 300 GB, and it took about 28 hours just to do the backup, so it seemed like it could easily take over 72 hours, meaning even if we started it Friday at 6 PM, it wouldn’t complete by Monday morning, and people would come in to work to find they had no email. No good.

This left the second option – setting up another server and moving mailboxes one at a time. This seemed pretty simple, except for the fact that people frequently use Outlook Web Access (webmail) to check their mail when out of the office, and ActiveSync to get mail on their phones. We tested the 2-server setup a while back and while mail gets routed properly, and users in the office are able to connect to both Exchange servers without problems, when they try accessing their mail from outside the office it fails. This is because if A is the old server (which people use for webmail) and B is the new server, if you log in to webmail (server A) but your mailbox is homed on server B, webmail will issue you a 302 redirect to http://B . If that’s not a valid URL outside your office (as is the case with us) it won’t work. If we could move everybody’s mailboxes from A to B overnight, and then make webmail point to B rather than A, that would solve the problem, but again, we had no way to know how long that would take, and I didn’t want to risk making anyone’s mail unavailable.

The plan I then came up with was to set up an Exchange frontend server in our office in front of our existing Exchange server. The frontend server would handle all the OWA/ActiveSync stuff and abstract that away from the backend server (where the mailboxes live). I could then set up an Exchange server in our office in a VM, migrate mailboxes over to them one at a time, and when it was done, copy the VM Exchange server to an external USB drive and drive it to the datacenter (about 25 miles away) and import the VM to our VMware production cluster, fiddle with its IP address and voila – the Exchange server would be moved.

But then I had a better idea: set up the frontend server and the new backend server in the datacenter in the VMware cluster from the get-go. Then when people accessed webmail they’d be hitting a server in the datacenter, which would connect to the Exchange server in the office transparently and relay them their mail. I could then move each mailbox from A to B with B being in the datacenter and the move taking place over the VPN.

Well, this is what I ended up doing, and there have been some wrinkles in the process, but so far it’s generally been working as I expected. I moved my mailbox to the new server today, and the move itself went fine – took about 90 minutes to move my 1.5 GB mailbox. It wasn’t quite a seamless process – the mailbox was moved but I couldn’t send or receive mail from the other server or the Internet in general. I managed to fix outbound SMTP pretty quickly (we relay mail through a smarthost in the datacenter) but inbound wasn’t working because the old server and new one couldn’t communicate for some reason, and all mail was being delivered to the old server. Among the things I did in attempting to solve this problem were create a new routing group for the servers in the datacenter (since we only had one Exchange server before, we only had one routing group), and then setup a Routing Group Connector between the two. This seemed like it should have resolved it but it didn’t. From server A, I could “telnet B 25″ and the connection would succeed, but if I issued a HELO I got 500 5.3.3 Unrecognized command. Same thing happened if I tried B -> A. After hours of checking settings, I came across a post on Experts Exchange that suggested the problem may be with the firewall (Cisco ASA) inspecting SMTP traffic. This was something that had flitted around in my head for a couple of seconds but I didn’t actually check it. In the end though, that’s what it was – the ASA in the datacenter was mangling the SMTP packets somehow and preventing the two from communicating. Once I issued the “no inspect esmtp” line, the whole day’s worth of mail came flooding through to my inbox (now on server B).

For some reason, however, mail was still not going B->A. I spent a while trying to figure out why – looking in logs, doing “telnet A 25″ and everything seemed fine. The mail queue kept showing queued messages though and an error like “remote server didn’t respond to the connection.” What ended up solving it, though, was deleting the Routing Group Connector associated with the datacenter routing group and re-adding it. For whatever reason, that cleared it right up.

So as of right now, we have Office and Datacenter, with Office having Exchange server A, and Datacenter having Exchange servers B and C – B being the new backend and C being the new frontend. DNS has been updated so webmail points to C, and C connects to A or B to get the user’s mail for OWA/ActiveSync. It works, it’s fast, I’m mostly happy.

I should probably mention that we discussed moving to Google Apps in the midst of this project. I was about 70% in favor of it, but in the end it seemed too expensive. We’ve already paid for our Exchange licenses and a hardware message archiver. Google’s price for Google Apps is $83/person per year if you include their 10-year archival option. If you don’t already have infrastructure in place, that might be cheap, but when you’re comparing it to “$0″ (and yes, I realize projects like the one I mentioned above aren’t free), it is a lot when you have ~100 users. In addition, most people at my company weren’t comfortable with the privacy/legal implications of having Google host our mail in the cloud – not to mention lots of people are Outlook addicts. They offered 25 GB storage per user, which was pretty compelling, and I personally love the Gmail interface, but in the end we opted to stick with Exchange for the time being.

I’ve known about ssh keys for a long time and frequently use them, most frequently so that a script can transfer a file between two servers without having to do some mumbo-jumbo where I try to pipe a password into it or some other wacky thing. I hadn’t fully embraced ssh keys, though, because I didn’t like the idea that if I lost my laptop, I’d be losing a free key into my servers. Then I discovered ssh-agent. This isn’t new, so I’m kind of embarrassed I didn’t know about it, but I’ve been using it for a few months now and I can’t imagine going back.

Using ssh-agent, you can wrap your private ssh key in a password and the only time you’ll need to enter your password is when you add the key to the agent. Once that’s done ssh essentially behaves as if your key wasn’t password-protected – you don’t get prompted for it again.

If you enable agent forwarding, and put your public key on all the servers you connect to, life gets even better. If your machine is A, and you put your key on B, C, D, and E, using ssh agent forwarding you can go A -> B -> C -> D -> E without being prompted for a password. It’s sweet!

Lots of power outages lately. Not the greatest time to move my site. Good thing I don’t need 99.99%+ uptime. Or even 95%…

I noticed WP was taking a long time to load since I moved it. I added an index to the “autoload” column on wp_options and it seems to be much faster.

I still hate MySQL though. Postgres is so much better.

I left Bluehost. They raised the prices (which seems to fly counter to what one would expect in the hosting industry with Google Apps breathing down their necks), and I realized I didn’t need it anyway. My MX records go right to Google. Anyway, time to go to sleep.

Wow. Glad I left. I imagine this will be temporary (like the HGTV ordeal earlier this year).

On another note, I got my 3rd FiOS bill – still running a credit. That’s $43 for 3.5 months of great service. Good luck competing with that, Optimum.

This is the second time this has happened: All the wifi devices in my house lose their connection to the FiOS router/access point (ActionTec MI424WR-GEN2). I checked my wired desktop and it wasn’t able to get an IP from the DHCP server (the router). The “Internet” light on the router was out. I unplugged the router and plugged it back in and it came back up fine. But this happened about a month ago too – I wonder if it’s a monthly thing? Either way, it’s annoying. Other than this, the internet service is phenomenal still.

So I got my second FiOS bill a couple of weeks ago. After the issue with my first bill was straightened out I ended up paying about $43 for the first 6 weeks of service. Well, my second bill was about $90, but applied a $180 credit on my account, so the bill showed -$91. So basically the first 3 months of service will end up costing me about $43. Even if it comes to $90/month for the remainder of the contract, this is such a huge savings that I don’t see how Cablevision could match it.

I saw that Cablevision has www.cablevision.jobs as the link for its jobs page. Curious, I looked up how much a .jobs domain cost. GoDaddy has them for $119! That’s insane!

Ran a ping test at pingtest.net today. Overall I can’t find fault with the FiOS service so far. Port 80 and 443 are open and I have them forwarded to my Linux box so I can actually run a webserver in my basement. I’m debating moving this domain over to my own linux box, since it’s super low traffic, but I probably won’t.

FiOS Ping Test for Nassau County, NY

Only (minor) problems with FiOS are:

• With FiOS Digital Voice there doesn’t seem to be a “distinctive ring” option, which I had found handy with Cablevision.

• The 10-digit dialing is annoying. It’s nice not to have to dial the “1″ before a long-distance number, but having to dial the 516 area code even for other 516 numbers is annoying. I know that’s how it is for everyone in NYC already though regardless of phone provider.

I’m waiting to see what my bill for month 2 will be. Lots of credits for month 1 so that will be extra low.

Not good. The rep I spoke with had said she’d intercept the first bill and apply all the credits up front. I guess being Christmas she couldn’t, so I got this first bill of $208.22.

This is WAY more than it should be, even without the credits applied. There’s a $40/month credit missing, and they’re charging me for HBO & Cinemax, which I was told was a free trial for 3 months. On the plus side, the taxes are lower than I expected. Attaching scans of the bill. If this doesn’t get resolved when I call on Monday I’ll be heading back to Cablevision, I guess. The whole point of this exercise was to save money.

FiOS bill page 1

FiOS bill page 3

Update: New bill amount after talking to the sales rep is $42.17. That’s better. We’ll see what the 2nd and 3rd bills are.

Fios was installed today. Took longer than expected but I guess it went well. FiOS digital voice is pretty good, has one or two niceties that Optimum Voice didn’t (caller ID info in the emails it sends, for instance). The Motorola STBs are way better than the Scientific Atlanta (or whatever) that CV provides… I’m awestruck that when you hit the Channel + button, the channel actually changes.

Cablevision offered to woo me back again but since the service was already installed I said no thanks. They did say they’ll pay the termination fee for me to go back. Interesting… Anyway, Fios’s speeds are pretty good, I got as high as 26/20 on the 25/15 line. The Actiontec router is pretty nice too (model #MI424WR-GEN2).

FiOS speed test to Cablevision's server 2009-12-04