Verizon FiOS is Slow

Earlier this Spring, FiOS finally came to my neighborhood, and I jumped on it as soon as I could get an appointment for the installation. The installation was pretty straightforward (no house burning down or anything like that). The guy installing it was little more than typical telephone guy - he didn't really know shit about networks, but could run a wire all over the house. At the end of the install I asked him what the password to the router was so I could admin it. His response was something like, "Oh, they don't let you know the password. I don't even know what it is - I have a special password that's just used for setting it up. You'll have to call customer service to make any changes." I was about to have him rip the wires out right then and there - I'll go back to my DSL if that's the case - but, I decided to wait until he was gone and try to login to the router with some default passwords just in case he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. I was right: the router actually asks you to set an admin password the first time you log in. Nice.

That's not the point of this post though. A few days after the install I started to notice that browsing the interwebs didn't really "feel" that much faster than when I had DSL. In fact, from the time I clicked a link to the time the page was fully rendered seemed slower. WTF? I'm supposed to be surfing light waves... man. It didn't take long for me to notice that every time I clicked a link, the browser spent a lot of time "Looking up ..." That's right: Verizon's DNS servers are slow as shit. So, here are thousands of people switching over to 5Mbps or 15Mbps connections that don't allow browsing the web any faster than DSL because Verizon's DNS servers are overwhelmed. Smart. The sad thing is, most people won't even notice that's the problem, and they certainly won't know how to fix it.

Well, here's how you fix it: (yes, that's the third colon in this post - I had a classmate in high school that used to complain that the colon was severely underused, so these are for you Colston) To fix the issue, log into the router and change the DNS servers that the router uses. Duh. But, who to switch to (worst. grammar. ever.)? OpenDNS. It's fast, it's free, it's the right thing to do. If you have the wireless router that Verizon typically installs, you have the ActionTec MI424WR - just follow the link, then follow the instructions. Once you switch DNS servers you'll be surfing all blazing-fast-like, and best of all, you'll be reducing the load on Verizon's name servers, making life a little more tolerable for those poor schleps that didn't read my blog (life in general is better when you read my words).

Here's the last rub (no happy ending, sorry). The router periodically resets to use the Verizon name servers. WTF? I haven't looked much into it yet, but every few weeks I have to log back in and change the settings back to OpenDNS. I plan on writing a quick script to monitor it for me and maybe even log in and change the settings automatically (if I feel like parsing HTML - AFAIK, there isn't a telnet interface to the ActionTec... remind me to look into that.)