I've had Verizon FiOS service since the first week it was available in our neighborhood (July 2005). At that time it was advertised as 15 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up, a.k.a. 15/2, for $49.99 per month. Measured speeds actually came very close, as shown here. And these measurements were repeatable.
Over the years the service has been upgraded by Verizon with no action required on my part. Today my service is called "FiOS Internet 20/5." Unfortunately the price has also crept up, to $62.99 per month, again with no action required on my part!
The problem is, today, my FiOS service is highly variable. At times it's very slow. Skype audio breaks up on some calls and works fine on others. But this is anecdotal. Where's the data?
Gathering data
So ten weeks ago, I started a regular program of testing using a keyboard macro program on a mostly idle PC connected via a wired Ethernet cable to a switch and then to the FiOS service jack. I set it up to run sequences of 3 Speedtests and 3 Pingtests every two hours throughout the day. In our house, these tests seldom ran uninterrupted for more than 30 hours and my manual restarts were sometimes delayed by several days. Also, the accuracy of the macro software wasn't always up to the fine mouse pointing that Speedtest and Pingtest require to select servers. But over the past 10 weeks I've managed to get 646 good Speedtest runs against nearby servers (in Boston) and 549 good PingTest runs against Boston servers.
This evening I've done some data analysis which confirms the wide variation I saw anecdotally.
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