Verizon FiOS Gaining Traction
Apr 2nd, 2007 by Alex
I rarely use wireless when I’m in the house. So rarely that I’ve got it disabled on the router. When I came back from running some errands out, I forgot to disable my card. All of these are all being picked up in the basement. Last time I checked I could pickup 12-15 access points by walking from one end of the house to the other, and that was almost two years ago.
It’s clear that there’s more than a few FiOS customers on my block now. The random five character SSID is characteristic of the Actiontec routers that Verizon is distributing when you sign up.
When I did a walkabout tonight, Net Stumbler located 25 access points. Based on the SSID at least 14 of them are running on FiOS. Other IDs included Cowboys2death, magic, Matrix, Nyya, PriNcess, Revolver, sergio1, Shepherd, Skins4Life and Slider. I was suprised that none of them had an out-of-the-box default SSID set, such as “netgear,” “linksys,” or “default.” That says something about people’s perception of security; two years ago there were a handful of unprotected APs, this time around ALL detected APs were protected by WEP.
