FTP

There are so many acronyms today that it's hard to keep up with them. But it gets even harder when new acronyms are also old ones. Case in point: FTP, which has stood for File Transfer Protocol (and File Transfer Program) for more than 20 years. I use ftp every week and in a previous life I was even part of a team that wrote an ftp program (in assembly language) for a CDC supercomputer.

A couple of years ago FTP gained another definition: Fiber To (the) Premises. It means that a fiber optic cable is connected to your house. Well, yesterday, fiber came to my premises in the form of a service called FiOS, from Verizon.

I had ordered the lowest priced FiOS internet service: $39.95 for 5 Megabits per second download and 2 Megabits per second upload. This is $10 cheaper than my current ISP and at least 3 times the marketing speed. When you order FiOS internet service they also move your (main) telephone line to the fiber. In January they will start offering TV over FiOS.

The install went pretty well, though it takes a long time. Since fiber optic cable cannot transmit electricity, and since ethernet and telephones both require electricity, there has to be a big box that converts the light signals from the fiber into electrical signals on the copper that runs through the house. And that box needs a battery backup if you want your phone to continue working during a power outage. Of course, who has a non-powered (i.e. not a cordless) phone anymore? Well, besides me.

Then, too, there was the small fact that easternet cable isn't quite the same thing as telephone wahr. I had DSL, which came over the telephone wire. I didn't have ethernet cable from the exterior telephone CPE to my router. So they had to install that as well by drilling yet another hole through the exterior of my house.

When it was all done I got to setup a new username and password for my internet stuff and we verified that it really did work. Now I just have to recable the office (the router is in a different place) and make it all look nice.

Then my wife asked, "Why doesn't the phone work?"

Sigh. I forgot to test that before the installer left. I did some tests and called Verizon. They had me do the same tests, then said they'd get the installer back out. Well, he had been gone over an hour and it was well past normal quittin' time, so I had to wait until the morning to get my telephone working. Turns out that the computer which was responsible for switching my phone from the copper lines to the fiber had gotten stuck mid-way and there was a "hold" on my line. They cleared that and now everything is working as it should.

Of course, the big question is whether it is faster or not. The answer is that it depends. There are a lot of things you do on the internet which are limited by things other than your network speed. For example, when you point your browser to some site you've never visited before (or more than an hour ago) then your computer uses DNS to look up the internet address for that web site. The DNS protocol has built in delays (of up to a minute) to give the servers time to answer before throwing up an error screen. Then the HTTP protocol does a lot of chatting back and forth with lots of little delays. Finally you get your content, and unless that is big you probably won't notice any significant speed difference. Then again, there are plenty of servers on the net which are incapable of giving you what you asked for at your internet connection's speed. They were slow with DSL and are no faster with FiOS.

When all is said and done, I do expect to see some important speed increases for the stuff I do over the internet. I just have to figure out what I'm going to do with that extra $10 each month!