Be warned, FIOS installation is a big deal. The Installer came at about 11:00 am and left at about 5:00 pm. Big job. In order to install FIOS, they have to cut the old copper wires that were coming to the house and bring new fiber cable. That in of itself probably took over an hour since there was only one person. At about 11:30 or so I tried calling home and I got the Verizon voice mail which was no longer set up with my outgoing message so I knew something was happening.
Here is what they did. First they install a new box on the outside of the house called an Optical Network Terminal. This then has three wires running into the house (for which they drilled holes). One is the phone wire which they hook up to whatever the old phone wire connected to (this means no extra phone wiring in the house needed). The second runs to a power connection as the ONT needs to be powered. The power connection also has a UPS (uninterruptable power supply or batter backup) connected to it. This is so that if the power were to go out, you would not loose phone. With the old copper wire phone system there was low voltage power running through the cable so the system powered itself. Now you need to plug in. The final cable is a coaxial cable which runs to a splitter which then goes to the new Verizon router. This is a wireless router similar to what the cable companies use. The other side of the splitter goes to the Verizon set top box, which in our case is also a DVR. The communication on this coax cable is two ways, so the set top box is also connected to the router. The wireless router also connects up our laptops to the internet with a whopping 25 Mbits of bandwidth (despite our only paying for 15, but hopefully Verizon is not reading this). There are also wired ports if we need.
All total the install process went smooth. The tech was nice and knew what he was doing and everything worked correctly when he was finished. Now we just need to explore the system. Hopefully in a week or so I will post a review. In the meantime, I have tried out the online portion of FIOS and I can log on to their website and basically be connected to my DVR. Not only can I set things to record (I could do that online with DirecTV as well) but I can now see what is set to record in one place, delete some of them if I need (since my kids love to press that record button) and even see what is on the DVR now (and delete them). I can even manage the parental controls from the internet site. I like the site so much that I would even consider using it to program the DVR rather than using the remote control in our family room!
Stay tuned then for a full review of Verizon FIOS.