- 3
- 45 922
Ross Nizlek
Registrace 27. 08. 2006
Getting FiOS (fiber optic internet/FTTH) installed in my condo building
Curious about what it takes to get your building wired for fiber optics? I spent 2020 and 2021 working with Verizon to get our condo building wired for FiOS service. This is the video of what it took to make it happen.
zhlédnutí: 38 911
The ends of all your sentences trail off in volume even when I turn my TV louder. Maybe there is something wrong with your recording device.
My god. You are a saint my man. I work for Telus up here in Canada as a Fiber Tech and if half the customers or property managers had your drive it would make our jobs A LOT more easier. Good job documenting all of this.
Hope you upgraded your Wyze Cams since this video was made lol
Definitely! haha
One advantage we have in a social housing building is the tenants have little to no say in unit access once a 24-hur notice is given. They have an option to schedule in a narrow window around the proposed date but that is it. They cannot outright refuse entry once it has been scheduled.
One issue we had when they were installing the HFC solution was getting power to the HFC units mounted on the exterior of the building. They had to have the Hydro utility and an electrical contractor install power lines to the HFC boxes on the outside of the building that ran to the utility room and the central power connection from a local transformer on the property. That delayed a month or so since Hydro had to schedule it with an existing upgrade of the entire intersection that fed the transformer on the property and required engineering modifications to that project as well as informing the bell provider of changes as well that cause them to have to advance a wiring and power project they were scheduled to do on the same intersection. So, most of the projects are never done in isolation. There is always work going on in the neighborhood that can affect your installation at hte building level. They also had to wait since several of the cable vaults in the area were being expanded in-situ and there was only one crew to upgrade 14 vaults that took three days each to perform. That was another project that got prioritized when the discovere4d they didn't have enough free fiber in the neighborhood for the intersection data sensors and the telecom and cable. Our upgrade triggered a whole cascade of changes throughout the entire utility and power infrastructure in the neighborhood and meshed it with those 8 or ten other projects by six different utility and telecom providers. As well we have six condo towers scheduled for construction that would need fiber infrastructure. This also triggered a cascade of area wide fiber upgrades as well to add capacity for buildings that are not expected to be completed for ten years from now.
Our cable company did an HFC build where they brough fiber to the building (a 72 pair cable so I was told) and then used Fiber to co-ax interfaces to connect to the RG-56 distribution boxes on the outside of the building. All our wiring to individual units comes from the distribution boxes and the cabling is all external. Our building was built in 1974 and did not have any in building conduits for telecom built in at the time of construction. It also used to be a low-income senior's building which also was a factor in why it did not have conduits. Lastly it was a low-income social housing building where the average income is only about $11,000 a year in Cana-bucks. It was done to improve reliability and to complete the upgrading of the core network in the neighborhood. Out of the 72 fibers in the cable they are only using three. two for customer internet connections from the RG-56 cable and one for control of the HFC units that are now networked together. Somewhere in the next decade or so they expect to replace the RG-56 at the building and going to the individual apartments with fiber. The cable company figures it will be at least a decade before they do it if no longer. The is just no technical or financial reason to upgrade a social housing building since only about 100 of the 390 apartments even use any services from the cable company. uBt they did boost internet speeds for the building by about 10%.
Yeah, eventually everyone will have fiber, but it will take a long time. Most of the builds I see are telcos trying to compete against cable companies, very rarely do I see cable build fiber except for greenfield deployments. Altice (Optimum) is the major exception but they compete against Verizon in much of their territory.
@@rnizlek Here is the other factor in our situation. Most of the social housing stock in the Toronto area was built during the early 1970's. Most buildings are considered end of life and some serious structural issues and cladding issues are beginning to appear on the buildings. We have had wall sections shear away leaving tenants with newly airconditioned units in -20 weather. We have had concrete support pillars suffer catastrophic failures due to water penetration causing oxidation and rot of the reinforcing turning it to crumbling red dust. So That means things like fibre optic are not even on the roadmap unless the ISPs want to do it. But there isn't a10 trillion dollars to replace the buildings nor are there units to put tenants in for years while buildings are rebuilt. The conservative government in Ontario sees no value in a social safety net or funding repairs to social housing buildings. Until several large buildings catastrophically collapse and hundreds of people die, they won't find the money to do anything but minor patches and minimal repairs.
This is an incredible amount of dedication. Verizon should have paid you to run that mule tape. Nice job.
or at least offer them a month of access :)
If it wasn't for you that building would never have gotten fiber 😅
Or at least not when we did. This year one other building in the neighborhood was retrofitted. Most buildings around here don't have it. Eventually Verizon will make it happen in order to retire the copper plant, but I didn't want to wait around for that!
cringe video
I went straight to the EVP of SE Marketing and had 2gig fiber lit in my neighborhood for all 2,700 single family detached homes within two months. We're now enjoying 12gigs. Then, Google Fiber found out but they could only afford to light the apartment buildings on the outskirts of my neighborhood. Hilarious how Google, for being so slow, got pushed out by AT&T.
Google has essentially given up on their fiber project and laid off most of the people working on it
Very nice! Yeah, AT&T is doing a tremendous amount of building. Last I checked they were doing something like 2.5m homes passed per year (though they might have slowed down a bit). Glad you were able to get service!
braver than the troops for all your effort
Learn how to do push-ups lol
I’d like to be your neighbor and friend 👍 well done
If only the federal government hadn't killed off Ma Bell in the 80's....
I hope the entire block recognises the lengths you went to!
One good thing in Canada is all the new buildings have multiple fibers. E.g. my MDU has Telus and Novus in addition to Rogers. I am impressed with your persistence to get fiber. I wish everyone MDU has a member like you who is supportive.
The amount of anxiety throughout this video lol
I work for a Fiber ISP and must say how impressed I am the steps you made to make the project smooth for all partys. Hope you got first years internet free.
Ha, I wish! I didn't get any special treatment but the cost savings from my previous provider effectively worked out to something like a year of free internet.
Congrats on FiOS. I moved from NJ(FiOS) to a new 55+ community in PA. My requirements were….. 2 car garage, full basement and…….. FiOS!
I've told my girlfriend that when we buy a home together fiber is an absolute requirement. There's no way I'm going to let it go after everything I went through on this project!
I wish i had someone like you to help get fiber to my building... you did amazing job
Just came across this today. I'm in NJ next to NYC, Verizon is home here and was one of the first states to get FIOS. That said it wasn't easy depending on where you are. When it first came here I was living in Garden Apartments that had cable and POTS in apartments all the time I was there up to 2013 no one could get FIOS even though it was run right down our street. Fast forward to 2018 and I had moved to a pre war apartment building where I could see the Empire State building from my living room. That was one of the only pluses that and by a miracle I could get FIOS. This though they ran conduit through the hallways and pulled through the wall into the apartment. All in all the install went well and I enjoyed having the service till I left last year. If i'm in the area and can get FIOS again I will certainly do that. I have to say your perseverance is commendable.
Hey can someone view your browsing history if you are connected to his FiOS wifi?
@@jesseowusuansah6762 I would doubt that directly. They might see it would be going through Verizon servers but your direct connection takes some work. Not as much but more than a casual glance.
My Job
Huge respect!
Excellent video! Lots of good info. I personally been through this process a few times with Verizon in Florida, which is now owned by frontier, but still fios however, I doubt I could’ve explained it as well as you did in this video. Great work!
I admire your persistence getting this done! I have Frontier (ex Verizon) Fiber now for 10 years and would not want anything else!
(From the 403rd Thumbs up), Mr Nizlek this video just short of a Hollywood production quality. Your first English teacher influence or perhaps you had a storyboard, as your video flowed just like that fiber cable from the outside of your building on through to the individual condo owners. For those of us who are a bit nerdy or have IT or telco experience it answered all of my questions. As I live in a multi-family dwelling who wants FiOS I feel as though I have a leg up thank you.
How many units actually purchased Fios services
From what I can tell, we are at about 50% penetration, April will be the 2 year mark. Two units still have POTS lines and the rest are with Comcast. A lot of that is just inertia, or older residents who don’t want changes to their TV setup. One or two new residents started with Comcast on move in, which really surprised me given that Fios was available.
I might be copying this process in a frontier MDU that’s still using their copper footprint. Fiber is on the street right now recently installed
Good luck! I know Frontier is doing a massive rollout right now. I don't haven't heard much about whether they are retrofitting MDUs so I'd be interested in your experience. They are building out my parents' condo complex at the moment, but it's not a multi-story building like I have here in DC. I'd be very interested to know if Frontier is willing to pull fiber all the way to the unit in an existing MDU. From what I have heard, AT&T will do it (although they are more reluctant to take on these projects vs Verizon and sometimes ask for the property to share in the costs), and I've heard CenturyLink generally tries to use G.fast rather than pulling fiber to each unit.
Hello sir Ji can you please help me
Wow man you are awesome you bought all those glow rods at home depot, they are expensive, I think like 34 bucks per 3, because Verizon guys are always lazy and don't want to do anything, they just go there for 1 hr and leave I am a contractor and always try to complete job no matter what, thanks for going above sir
Ended up getting them on Amazon, I think they were all around the same price. I ended up selling all but one set once the project was done, I really don't need more than one set personally. It cost me some out of pocket but at least I got a lot of my money back.
Amazing fiber optic
Ross , you did a very good job !
Wonder how many people signed up for service after your project was completed.
Out of 26 units, I'd say about 40-50% are with Verizon now. We also have a business internet line for the building access control and security cameras through them. As far as I know, no one who has switched has gone back to the cable company.
seems very stressful having to rely on tenants to allow project to continue.
You don’t need internet, get outside an exercise
great video on the process, we had internet run in our house nearly 20 years ago and with Fios lowest offering being 300mbps now I am thinking of redoing our internet with Verizon running fiber in our rural area now I know to take a day I am off to run everything in my house.
I watch a lot of fiber install videos because I find it interesting to see how it's done in different parts of the world. This one was very good! I live in Germany and the install process at one of my family member's house was very different from the one in this video (granted, it was a different scenario involving a detached single-family home, not a condo). What I'm interested in is what type of network Verizon installed, AON or GPON? For those interested: In Germany, telecom lines almost exclusively run underground in cities (in rural areas, telecom poles are seen more often, but are far from the norm). Instead of the black junction boxes on top of the poles seen in the video, we have larger, curbside cabinets to connect the lines going to the consumers with the lines coming from the exchange. In my family member's case, there was no prior residential fiber in the town at all. A provider offered to build out the network, but only on the condition that a certain proportion of the residents would agree to sign a 2 year service contract with them. The install would then be free of charge for those who signed the contract. Starting in late 2020 with the "pre-marketing", the connection went live in May of 2022. Most of the fiber networks in Germany are GPON. I can only hope that the providers have the good sense to put the splitters in the junction cabinets instead of burying them underground, which would make it much easier to convert to AON down the road or to give individual customers a dedicated line.
@@dtuttle351 FiOS actually doesn't have any XGS-PON. Verizon is using NG-PON2 instead. It is only in 12 COs in NYC at the moment from what I have been told. There is a little BPON still out there but it is being phased out. It's >95% GPON at the moment.
My city is finally getting fiber internet. I think I'm just as excited as you were, though I don't have the challenge of convincing all of my neighbors to get onboard with it since I have a single family home. You were definitely very committed!
Great video and write up
Amazing spirit. I had to deal with a couple of ISPs in my country for similar reasons. From your video I must admit that the Verizon team is top-notch when it comes to fiber deployment.
I work for a different telecommunications/internet company and very impressed with how through this video is and actually highly impressed with Verizon on how they did this process. Currently our company is skipping most apartment buildings because we are still building the fiber network to more rural areas.
That seems to be the case with a lot of companies. Some come back to do this kind of work, others try to find ways to shortcut the process. I hear CenturyLink likes to use G.fast to serve individual units over existing copper wiring, for example. Verizon seems to be very willing to take on MDUs but it appear related to their desire to retire their copper facilities. They can't do that until everyone is off copper. I wonder if their approach would have been different if we didn't have a handful of copper circuits between a few units with landlines and service for our call boxes.
This is great, it explains what my building will go through at some point. I'm curious how they managed pulling the right amount of microduct since each apartment will have a different length of microduct needed. did they pull all 12 to the first floor, then eleven to the second, then 9 to the third, until you had seven, and then pass the remaining six to the attic runs? It seems like it would be tricky to bind the microduct to one another until after the all twelve units get their microduct plumbed. If your building's fiber runs are like a E turned 90°, our building is more of a F style layout. And given that the vertical run is like a 3" diameter metal conduit I suspect our microduct runs will only by used for the horizontal runs in each floors hallway. I'm curious to know where they plan on running the walljack, so I can prepare to run a conduit from that to where I want to put the ONT, now I know what I need to ask for. thanks.
Yes, that's exactly what they did. They pulled all 12 to the first, terminated one there, then 11 to the 2nd floor, and so on. Then at my unit (top floor) they cut all all the micro ducts off. They then used little plastic connectors called 'sharkbite fittings' to connect the microduct pulled from the other units into my units. Not sure if they used sharkbites in the other two stacks of units but I don't think so. The sharkbites are a bit of a pain because when the techs pull the fiber through the microducts there's a chance they an get snagged on the sharkbites. It happened on one of the pulls to another unit. Thankfully the sharkbite was in my unit so they had access to cut it open and thread the fiber through. In terms of where the wall jack is, they typically put it near where the fiber enters the unit. In a lot of MDU setups I've seen, they run the fiber through the hallways, but our board didn't want the conduit visible if possible so they pulled it up through the utility risers. Verizon was great to work with and they were willing to modify plans to meet our requirements. Hope this helps!
@@rnizlek Interesting that they pulled the fiber instead of jetting it through the microduct. I'm no expert, but apparently that not only greatly reduces the friction but it also reduces the chance of snag at the connection points.
@@paoloposo You also have to buy microfiber to blow it which is more expensive than a flat drop and with such short runs it isn't even worth it to set all that up
awesome if you like continuous updates in the middle of the day instead of I don't know maybe doing it in the middle of the night when nobody's watching. awful just awful
This video was so helpful and exactly what I was looking for. Thank you for your service to your building and for sharing your process so perfectly. This is a case study in taking initiative, being creative and persistent, and problem solving. I didn’t realize until yesterday how much time I have lost in my business working from home because my upload speed is capped on cable. I took my laptop to a friend’s yesterday and uploaded in 1/10th of the time it takes at home. I also live in a condo in DC, but I am East of the River. I hope to have as much success. My only question is who did you initially email to get a response?
Just Google Verizon Enhanced Communities. There's a contact for each region. That's not the person you need to talk to but they can get you to the right group. The other way is just to file a FAST ticket through customer service.
Hi, do you know how we can get verizon to take back their equipment and unplug cables from the fioz box (outside the wall of my home) from the electric pole? I don’t have a Rison I guess the past owners did but Verizon never took back the equipment and now I have a cable hanging that I don’t need getting in the way.
I would think anyone would want to get the best source of internet possible, no matter what. Your neighbor might not have known it at the time, but I hope they fully do now, that what you did here, and you, yourself could only be describe as a godsend.
You just have to love neighbors that have no cost, only advantages, but just refuse because they can. But at least he was ok with the ducts going through his condo. And man I would hate all that waiting time. When we come, we usually do all the work in one day. We blow the fiber, splice it in the home and the enclosure outside and patch the customer in the PoP, so he is up and running after only a few hours. I would be pissed if all the cable is ready and I had to wait weeks for 2 splices that take 5 minutes. And we didn't change anything bec of Covid. We got a document that we were workers for critical infrastructur and everything continued as before.
Apparently that's pretty common for Verizon. Although I am told that now they don't send the inside path people out, they just have the techs pull the fiber once someone orders service, except for new builds. But to actually work on the fiber Verizon needs to use Verizon employees per their union contract - for running the conduit, they can use contractors. So there's a bit of a disconnect between the contractors and the Verizon employees. I've talked to others who have had their buildings wired and the wait times are similar. But that's pretty unique to Verizon I believe. I love the service though. When I bought my unit I accepted I would never get fiber and that was a compromise I made. I'm thrilled that it was able to happen even though it took forever.
You did an amazing job making this video. I am truly blown away. I work in telecommunications and I'm amazed by how well you communicated this experience. I too am very passionate about internet, love my job, and providing customers with a good experience and strong connection is an amazing feeling.
Thanks for the kind words. Other than the stress of managing the project I found the whole thing very interesting. I definitely learned a lot about fiber and FTTH that I never knew before I started this.
DSL was just as good and it came over the phone lines. I used to work for Verizon and when they tried to implement FIOS back in 2007/ 2008 the company was going bankrupt !!!
How? I have DSL, and I am so itching to change to a better service.
AT&T offered up to 18 Mbps at my house up until around 2019-2020. I hardly consider that "just as good". The service was reliable as I had relatively few service outages in the decade we had the service, but its just painfully slow compared to the 500 Mbps I have with comcast.
Top tier content Ross. Installing that pull string was a pro move on your part.
FYI, a tiny correction, this is not an MDU setup, MDUs are where there is one central ONT for the whole building, whereas this is our standard setup, where each location has it's own ONT. I'm a Fios Tech. Great video though.
I'm a tech in Manhattan all apt buildings are considered MDU (multi dwelling unit)... he's not talking about a MDU ont building setup
@@billkenny2570 Huh, I guess I don't think of it as MDU, as in my opinion, MDU is where everyone is fed off one or more centralized ONT versus having one in their unit.