Thread: Making your life with FiOS Better: A guide of tips, tweaks, and tutorials.

Verizon FiOS is a great service, especially the internet, which is what this tutorial focuses on, of course. FiOS Internet is unthrottled, is not oversold like cable commonly is, has no bandwidth cap, and has excellent latency. It has come in many flavors (speeds) over the years, including the new 150/35Mbps plan. This tutorial is aimed at squeezing out every last drop.

Part one: Half-Open connections patch (Windows XP and Vista ONLY)
FiOS, especially in its more powerful flavors, can handle a serious amount of data and connections (the service, anyway. I’ll get to the router soon). The obvious first step to optimizing throughput is to allow your OS to handle that many connections as well. By default, Windows XP and Vista only allow 10 half-open connections, which is a limiting factor with torrents. Download the half-open limit patcher for Windows, run the patcher, change the limit of half-open connections to whatever you please (>100 is recommended), apply the patch, and restart. You should have the capacity to connect to more seeders/leechers now, at least from an operating system standpoint.
You’ll notice that there is no “configuring your torrent client” section here – the reason for this is the abundance of tutorials already made for each individual torrent client – use the search bar on this site, and Google, and you should come up with an abundance of tutorials that suit your needs.

Part 2: Port Forwarding with the FiOS Router (Actiontec MI424WR)
Because Verizon does not packet-shape or throttle, you are able to use a static port to forward for your client. Selecting a port is not difficult, but if you inadvertently open the wrong one, you may jeopardize the proper function of another program, or open your router/OS to Trojan horses. Here is a list of ports to avoid at all costs, and here is a list of known commonly-used ports. If there’s a program you don’t use on the port you choose, don’t worry about it. But, for example, if you play Counter Strike: Source, you wouldn’t want to torrent from port 27010 or 27015, which are the commonly used ports for the Source engine multiplayer servers.
Once you select a port to forward in your torrent client, check to make sure that the port is also forwarded in Windows Firewall. This should happen automatically with a restart, but double-check, just to make sure. Again, there are scores of tutorials of how to do this, such as this one for Windows XP.
Lastly, you need to open this port in your FiOS router (AND your primary/secondary router, if you have one connected to the FiOS router, assuming it's acting as a ROUTER, not a SWITCH/WAP). The FiOS tech most likely set up a new login and password when he configured your system, and wrote it down in a booklet for you to keep. If you can’t find this booklet, reset the router by holding the reset button down with a paperclip or a pen for 30 seconds. Type “192.168.1.1” in the address bar of your router to bring up the login page for the router. The default login is “admin”, and the default password is either “password”, or the serial number listed on the back of your router. I recommend resetting the password to one you’ll remember, as reading off the serial number each time gets irritating.
Once you’ve logged in, click on Firewall Settings, accept the warning, then click Port Forwarding on the sidebar, and you should find a screen that looks like this:

Just like in the above image, select your computer's IP address (identifiable by the computer name, or my running ipconfig in the command prompt), "Custom Ports", "Both", and the port you selected earlier. Once you click Add, you should see a new entry at the bottom of the list that looks like this:

Now it's time to restart the router, then check the port to make sure everything is set up properly.



Part 3: Configuring a second router for use with the FiOS MI424WR Router

Now, here’s something that stuck me up for months. Yes, FiOS service is awesome, and yes, it “just works” once it’s set up, but the one part of the system that always irked the hell out of me is the router. The Actiontec MI424WR router, I’ve always thought, is sub-standard for such a powerful internet connection. Here’s why:
-No Wireless-N (This is the most understandable, as the N protocol is still not approved by the IEEE)
-100Mbps LAN ports (Oh, come on! Since when is Gigabit not an industry standard?)
-Revisions A-D of the MI424WR suffered from a small NAT table, leading to a low amount of simultaneous connections (for torrenters, anyway)

Some or all of these shortcomings can be overcome by adding on another router, depending on the situation. The important part of the system to understand is this – the router is responsible for controlling your FiOS TV features! It must be connected to a Coax cable in order for Video On Demand, DVR, and Guide to function. It must also be connected to the internet, which, in most (BUT NOT ALL) cases, is delivered through the Coax anyway. This means that the router cannot simply be replaced, even if the tech that did the install ran a CAT5 cable to the router to supply internet. That being said, if they DID, your life has been made infinitely easier! You owe it to yourself to follow this guide, and enjoy being awesome!
Now, for the rest of us that aren’t so lucky…
This is the holy grail of setting up a working connection between the MI424WR and a second router. There are 9 (8, really) options for setting up the Actiontec with another router, all using slightly different methods, and all with different advantages and drawbacks.

Unfortunately, none of the options available get rid of the 100mbps bottleneck altogether, and only the difficult, circuitous ones (options 4-9) solve the issue with the small NAT table of the older routers. Since I have a Rev. E router, I opted for option 3 – Basically a LAN to LAN connection, using my secondary router as a sort of glorified switch. This way I have Wireless-N, 3 computers on a Gigabit connection (all I need, I could add another switch otherwise), and I’m not double-NAT’ed (using the NAT table of both routers). It’s the setup that I recommend – I used to use option 1, which is the same configuration, except using the second router as an actual router, and it just created too many headaches. In that process, I even convinced the FiOS techs that my router had bricked, and they sent me a Rev. E
Sorry that this is all a little cluttered and whatnot – I’ll try to sort out the organization and wording better. In any case, I hope this makes the lives of all of you using FiOS that little bit better, and of course, feel free to reply here or PM me with questions.

Disclaimer: I never worked for Verizon – I sold FiOS products under a different sales company for a few months, which is where most of the interest came from. No paranoia worries – I’m not in with VZ, Lol.