Speed Up FiOS with a 2005 Installer
I’m part of the 1%. That is, I have access to FiOS here in the US which grants me the privilege of ridiculous Internet speeds at home. I recently upgraded to the Verizon 75/35 Mbps plan.1
Of course the Verizon Speedtest always shows amazing speeds. In reality, I experienced a slowdown a couple of weeks after upgrading. I quick call to Verizon produced a curious suggestion. “Go to this Apple support page and download their Tuner installer”. What? There’s an Apple Tuner installer? Yes there is and it is from 2005. After reading a bit, the installer sounded benign. It simply changed some networking parameters that could easily be changed back.
After a reboot, I was back in business. So after running a 7 year old installer, the Internet speeds that only became available a month ago, now work as expected.2
Verizon speed test results:
As a side note, Flash based speed tests are not accurate. Not to mention, I don’t have Flash installed. Here’s a good speed test to try. SpeedGuide.net is also very good and provides many more diagnostics
<li id="fn:hate">It's ok. I hate me too. <a title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text" href="#fnref:hate" rev="footnote">↩</a></li>
<li id="fn:expected">That is to say, not as advertised but still very good. I get consistently >30Mbps down. I'm not naive enough to believe that I get what I pay for. <a title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text" href="#fnref:expected" rev="footnote">↩</a></li>