Saturday, January 12, 2008

VERIZON FiOS UPDATE

As an update to my Dec. 24 posting on the blog and e-mailings to some close friends, we DID end up having the Verizon FiOS installed today.

At this moment it has it's good points and bad.  The actual hookup time for
television, computer, and telephone took under 4 hours.  WIth an old house it
involved some drilling through the floor, drilling through walls, running wire
along wall area, etc.  I'm not always crazy about that kind of stuff, but
realizing it's an old house and that's about all they can do, it wasn't a huge
surprise.

The television is fine, and I think ultimately I will like it better than the
cable company I had before.  And of course, our home telephone is now
transmiting over  the very latest in fiber optic technology.

My disappointment has been with the internet.
Our old MAC computer did meet the minimal requirements for FiOS and
TECHNICALLY it does connect to the internet. HOWEVER, we although we were able to go to
www.aol.com
we were not able to open and read e-mail due to needing software updates.  We were also not able to set up Verizon e-mail accounts due to needing software updates.  It remains to be seen if this is just stuff we will have to
download, if we will need to go to the Apple store and buy and updated operating system, and even in a worse case scenario, if we're going to need a new comptuer.  Mary Ann IS able to use her Dell laptop at home, and Rachel will be able to use her MAC laptop at home, so we CAN check our e-mail on those comptuers but the computer end is still very disappointing to me.

The Verizon technician said he "does not know much about MAC computers or AOL" so he left and was unable to help us.  He was a nice guy, but THAT was disappointing.  We do have a Verizon number we can call for technical support.  It will remain to be seen how this stuff will work out; but honestly, at this juncture I'm kind of frustrated and disappointed.

Incidentally, I'm writing this on the ancient computer at the church office
and putting it out on very old fashioned AOL dialup!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A similar situation with our 2 year old PC - Fios service installed 1/31/08 - I get the "high speed" internet if I sign on to my old AOL account, but I can not complete the activation of the Verizon service; it keeps saying I have to disable firewalls, anti virus software, etc. Even with all that done, with downloading the latest versions of Internet Explorer and AOL, I still can not get the Verizon service. I have been frustrated by Verizon help because they say the problem is not theirs.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
RAN