Review and information - Verizon High Speed Internet (DSL)

For the longest time our city has been limited to satellite internet and dial-up. Just recently there was a community-wide dispute with Verizon that prompted them to install DSL in our village. Being one of the few geeks in the area, I have been testing its limitations and greatnesses and I am here to review some of it. Before it was installed searches did not reveal the true statistics of the "High Speed" internet from Verizon, so here is the scoop.

Verizon DSL speed and caps
The speed averages out at about 300 KB/s, which is considered 3 Mb/s. Upload speeds have reached up to 150 KB/s, which is equivalent to the download speed of the best satellite internet providers. The best advantage is that there are no bandwidth caps, so you could theoretically upload and download constantly. However, running a server is against the Terms of Use. The only condition that would void these terms is heavy server usage, so for a small home fileserver or ssh tunnel it is no issue.

Verizon Software and Hardware
Verizon installs superfluous hard / software on the existing computer infrastructure. From what I have seen it serves no purpose other than providing links to 192.168.0.1 and its subpages.

The router that was shipped is also the modem. This saves some room, but makes custom firmware tricky and it also means that to bring the wireless network offline the ethernet connection may also go dark for that period of time. Of course, a second router can be attached to it via ethernet cable.

Verizon technician
The technician was new to the company and made several mistakes, and at one point had a bout of paranoia that he would be fired upon returning to the Verizon headquarters. Also, the technician refused to run the necessary cables anywhere but on the front of the house, meaning that you could be in for some manual labor when you purchase this package. Lastly, the technician left the old networking equipment plugged into the desktop computer, which would be irremovable bloat for a non-tech-savy person.

Price
Verizon has a monopoly of the phone market in my area. With a bundle, we are saving more monthly than we used to pay for our old service. It's like we're being payed to use the internet connection. The price, when bundled, is $35 for both phone and internet.