News & Views

First Impressions of Verizon's Fiber Optic Internet Service
Last night I had a chance to try out Verizon's new fiber optic Internet service which is being rolled out in several towns in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. A Mac client of mine decided to sign up for the service. This client had been using America Online at $24/month. The Verizon fiber optic plan she chose costs her $35/month. This plan has a downstream speed of 5 megabits per second and an upstream speed of 2 megabits/sec. So for an extra $11/'month she is getting an Internet connection that is roughly 100 times faster.

You can feel the speed when you fire up Safari. First thing I did was go to the bandwidth speed test at Speakeasy. http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest. In less than a minute, Speakeasy confirmed that the fiber optic bandwith was for real. The downstream clocked in at 5 megabits/sec. The upstream clocked in at 1.7 megabits/sec.

Here is where the fun part started. This client's computer is a Snow iMac, with a 600 MHz G3 processor. The computer has 128 megabytes of memory and is running Panther (Mac OS 10.3). Theoretically, this computer doesn't meet the minimum requirement for iChat videoconferencing. I was fully cognizant of that when I plugged in my iSight and said, "Let's give this a try."

Sure enough, the iChat videoconference worked well, even with this low-memory G3 iMac. I asked my friend on the other side to view our video stream full screen, and he told me that it looked good -- without much pixelation at all. (He was using a G4 Powerbook on his side.)

While the blazing fast downstream is what makes Verizon FIOS (fiber optic service) desirable to most people, it's the upstream speed that attracts me most. Verizon FIOS is not available in the Maryland town where I live. I settle for using a cable modem whose upstream speed is 128 kbps. I upload QuickTime files to the Internet pretty often, and it takes me a minute to upload a megabyte. That doesn't sound so bad, except I need to upload 480 megabytes to the Internet Archive this week -- and I'm not looking forward to it.

The Verizon FIOS upload speed is about 12 megabytes per minute. That means I could upload almost an entire CD-ROM in one hour. That's more my speed.

Here in the Washington DC-area, the traffic on the highways around town is often gridlocked. I can't help but think that iChat videoconferencing is one way for people to not have to travel so much. It's predicted that 5 million more people will be moving to the Washington DC-area over then next 10 years. I can't imagine the traffic nightmares that will ensue. One thing is for sure -- it's cheaper to buy Mac Minis for everyone than it is to build new highways. I wonder if the Federal government might one day require half of its workforce to work at home -- videoconferencing via iChat when needed. Not every job can function in this way, but many could.

All in all I'm impressed with Verizon's fiber optic service. I forgot to mention, the service plan I tried out is the lowest speed plan. There are higher speed plans you can get. If you go that route, just make sure your seat belt is securely fastened and your chair is in the fully upright position.

Phil Shapiro

The author works as an independent Macintosh consultant in the Washington DC-area. He can be reached at pshapiro@his.com and at http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/pshapiro