Well I wrote about Time Warner's VoIP and that prompted someone to write in on their expereinces with Verizon's FIOS (Phone, Internet and TV):
To get the NFL network I switched from IO cable, regular verizon phone service and verizon DSL to go to Verizon FIOS triple play (with FIOS TV). Well I had it installed on Thursday and I will share what I have experienced so far. I had many premium movie stations on both packages. I saved better than 20% by going with the triple package.
First I will cover the simple ones:
Phone- Works as good as before, with free long distance and toll calls. It has a battery back up, so in a power outage the phone will still work for 8 hours of talk time (I understand IO cable phone service doesn't have a battery back up).
Internet- 20 megs download speed and better than 5 megs upload (ran an online test to confirm these numbers).
TV- Well I find the picture to be equal to, or maybe a little better than cable. The sound is better with FIOS, rather than cable. I understand FIOS has more bandwidth so there isn't a need to compress the signal as much, so you get better quality. The cable guide and interaction is a wash, both IO and FIOS have their pluses and minuses. The one thing that FIOS really stands out, is on demand. They got tons of free on-demand. On-demand is included on all the premium channels, like HBO, Startz etc, is included free with the channel. On top of that they got tons of regular cable TV channels with on-demand. So there is almost always something worth watching when you want to watch TV. In addition I got the multi-room DVR. For those that don't have DVR, with their digital cable, get it! Best cable money you can spend, it changes the way you watch TV. The multi-room allows me to record programs on one TV, but be able to watch them on any tv in the house. This is a pretty cool feature.
Finally for the techies- FIOS brings fiber optic feed right to your house. THe fiber optic cable has 4 different spectrums of light (TV, internet, phone and interactive). Once it gets to your house it's converted into regular phone wire for your phone and coax cable for your TV and internet. Because the signal is generated right at your house, you don't have the problems with signal strength or interference.
I moved and had Time Warner come and install a cable modem in my room. The cable modem has a place for a VoIP. I'm not quiet clear on what this is. Is it just a faster phone line or what? Can someone tell me about it as I bought the Triple Play for $130 a month I might as well make the most of it.
Also where do I hook up my phone? In the original phone outlet, the guy put like an extention that has 2 phone outlets and one of the wires goes directly to my cable modem? Do I plug a phone into the cable modem (it has a phone outlet) or the regular phone outlet? Or does it have to be VoIP (whatever that means)?
Answer 1: VoiP Is telephone service via the internet, as opposed to a tradional land line. Phone signals are essentially converted in digital data packets and transmitted via the internet. If you purchased triple play, you should not still have a land line.
Answer 2: Right now Voip is a lot cheaper. It's not as reliable since you loose service when your internet goes down. We have Vonage for I think $25/mo, includes local and long distance.
Answer 3: Price is the main difference. However, sometimes people claim voice quality is worse(I definetly have not noticed there). There is also a difference between Vonage and other external VOIP providers compared to your cable company providing VOIP. When it is an external provider the phone has to go over the internet to a voip providers office which provides more potential for problems. It also means any reason you internet goes down will bring down you phone. When it is your cable provider like you have it never makes it to the outside internet. It will travel on the cable companies network to their office, where it is converted to a phone call. This allows them to provide quality of service on the call making the risk of it going down less. Also, do not buy a VOIP phone. That is for "softphone" solutions like skype where your computer must be on all the time. You have a hardphone solution, where you just want to use your regular phone.
Answer 4: VoIP is a great, tax free solution to a LAN line, (not a land line). Sometimes, when your internet signal goes out you will lose your phone for a little while, but if you have a cell phone it shouldn't be too much of an issue. I have used VoIP for 4-5 years now and many larger companies use it in their offices and you may not even know it. It's been used for well over 10 years in the business word.
Question: I recently set up a Netgear wireless router, in which I have a desktop hardwired and a laptop with a wireless card. When turning on either machine, the network works fine on either. After being left on for some time, and then resumed, the internet doesn't work on either. I am still getting a good to excellent signal on both machines when this is happening, but when I open a browser it cannot find the page. It happens all the time with IE, and although it doesn't happen with firefox all the time, it does happens with firefox also. If I restart the machine it works fine.
Any suggestions as to what I'm doing wrong? Thanks-
Answers:
You can have an excellent signal, but there can still be "limited or no connectivity". I never fully understood this problem, but some thing that have helped me during the sporadic occurances of LoNC, would be to simply go to wireless settings in your router and just save them. I'm not sure what netgear uses as their gateway IP though.
Are the machines going into a sleep mode or hibernation? If thats the case, its common, just go to Control Panel - Power Options and choose presentation on the desktop. On the laptop set everything on "When plugged in" to "never".
Signal interference, maybe? I have a Direct TV dish on the house, and no matter where I tried to hook up a wireless router it wouldn't work. I finally had to put both computers in the same room and use an Ethernet cord to attach both. Hope that helps.
Had the same problem settings up a friends netgear and it would do that until I updated the firmware.
Defiantely a problem with the router. There should be nothing that would interfere with a computer that is wired directly to the router even coming out of any type of sleep or hybernation mode. I would go the routers website and see if there are any firmware updates and if that doesnt fix it and you recently got it i would take it back to the store and exchange it.
Signal Interference will not come from DirecTV. We're talking a 2.4GHz signal, not a satellite feed being directed to a dish.
Is it using WIndows Zero Config or does the Netgear have an interface for setting up the WLAN? The Windows Zero Config is garbage and should be disabled if the netgear has a software option.
The router may not have the optimal configuration. With my Linksys router every few days I have to reboot it by pulling out and plugging the power cord. I figure that I have to optimized my firmware configuration, but I am not going to bother doing that. I don't want to mess up and have a dead router.
Have had similar problems from time to time and solve by unplugging the router and replugging it. Have never got a satisfactory explanation as to why it occurs or how it can be prevented, but rebooting has worked everytime so far.
So, I bought my new computer last Friday. A Hewlett Packard 7334n. It's pretty sweet. It has an AMD Athalon 64 dual core chip, 2G RAM, 250G hard drive and I bought a 2nd, internal 160G hard drive. 20 inch Samsung LCD monitor, speakers, ups battery backup, and a few other goodies. I ordered Comcast broadband today.
Both the Comp USA salesman and the Best Buy salesman recommended a front-end router for security. Apparently the front end router has it's own IP address and if a hacker comes down the line they'll run into the router, not be sure what's behind it or where it is, and possibly move on to an easier target. Securing the wireless LAN is an issue though, according to the Best Buy salesman, who tried to sell me a service visit to ensure that the "bit encryption was properly set up on the LAN for maximum security." Everyone else I have spoken to, including Cisco certified networking techs and other IT professionals tell me the salesman is full of u know what. What should I believe?
Answers:
Its very easy to do it yourself: set the wireless encryption (WEP) to at least 128 bit, and turn off the broadcasting of your network name. All this can be done by logging into your router and setting it up. the instructions should come with your router. Also change the name of the SSID (network name). As you said, follwo the directions that come with the router and it's not very difficult.
If you truly want to secure your wireless network, disable SSID broadcasts, and exclude ALL MAC addresses from the allowed pool except for your own machines. There is also a little software utility that's free from a company called AirDefense that keeps your wireless clients safe from intrusion. And as was said, we can all help you do that, don't listen to some BestBuy hack.
I just bought a Linksys Wireless-G card for my desktop and their Wireless-G router, I pressed a button on the router during setup, and I had an instantly configured WPA-encrypted Wireless LAN. Whatever you do, I recommend buying the same brand router as the Wireless card you have. I'm assuming that your 7334n is a desktop and that you need to buy a wireless network card if you haven't already.
A good router coupled with the Windows Firewall is probably sufficient, assuming you aren't serving up content that could attract random attention. Simply blocking any inbound connections will protect you from most hacks and a good anti-virus/anti-spyware program will take care of the rest. But it is important to put a relatively good firewall/router at the frontgate. Norton Internet Security and even Norton AntiVirus can cripple system performance depending on the version and/or the other system processes with which it has to interact/co-exist. Norton's tools are quite comprehensive and effective, but they are often unpredictable in their interactions with other software apps/services. I'd probably go with McAfee or AVGFree.
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