It’s been a fun weekend, but the most important part is probably that we actually moved into the house and will now be living out of it (and, in my case, working out of it). :D Most of our stuff is still in the apartment waiting to be boxed up, but the important stuff (computers, some clothing, cooking things) are all over here now. I’m typing this from my new office at my new desk.
(Relatedly, my photo journal and photos site have both gotten updates, also from the house. Yay!)
I think it happened mostly by accident. On Thursday, I had some time, so I went to the Fios store in Bakery Square to sign up for service. Turned out they could send a technician the following morning, although why one was necessary was unclear… the house had Fios service less than 6 months ago, and the previous tenant had the router in the exact same room where we wanted it. But meh?
We’d inquired about service the previous Saturday, and as our house is wired with coax already (in pretty much every room that matters), we decided to get the 50/50 plan, since that was the highest Verizon would provision on coax, and we were less than eager to have new wiring work done to run cat5 in the necessary ways to get service in the office on the second floor.
So the technician comes out the following morning (within his time window, amazingly!) and I meet him here, and he starts evaluating how to drill holes and run cat5 from the basement to the office. Uh…?
So apparently Verizon no longer provisions new users on coax, even though the entire reason we’d selected Fios (over cable, and why we even considered it alongside DSL) was that it could run over coax already in the house, and a large part of our decision for the 50/50 plan (in addition to it being enough speed) was that we wouldn’t need new wiring done.
I managed to get the tech to escalate to his manager, who approved a new provisioning on coax for us. Less than 5 minutes after that call, we were up and running… less than 24 hours after I had signed up at the store. So that was fast service.
We’ve been spending weekends (Friday and Saturday nights) at the house, so we did that after climbing and food on Friday… but then wondered why we shouldn’t just spend the weekend moving essentials over and just start living over here instead. So we did that too, and spent the amazingly nice weather this weekend moving things over and generally making the house livable.
Tomorrow will be my first day of work from the house. I expect VPN will severely limit the benefit of getting Fios, although given the video call problems I often have, hopefully things will generally improve with the (much) higher speeds. (And, in a speed test, we actually got more than the advertised speeds — about 57 down and 65 (!) up.)
This post is a wall of text, so here’s a climbing Ian.
