Verizon suckage
March 6, 2009 by Jin
Filed under Jin's Corner, Off the Wall, Recent
It’s amazing how painful a company can make a fiber optic service installation. About three weeks ago, I decided to take advantage of Verizon’s new FIOS Internet service offering and have them install it at my house. I was getting along pretty well with vanilla, low grade DSL (768 kbs), but FIOS offered speeds of 20 MBs, and it seemed to make sense to upgrade given more higher resolution content was being offered on the Internet. The technician left my house about 2 hours ago, but I’m still seething.
Here’s a pro tip for those of you installing services into people’s homes: make sure the person can actually use the service before you leave. After the technician verified that FIOS worked perfectly well on *his* laptop directly from the wall plate, he told me that technically he was under no further obligation to hook up my PC, my laptop or even configure the router that he brought along. Yup, for all the rest of that, I was on my own. Fortunately, I’m experienced with computers and managed to get most of them running after some trial and error. God help those poor bastards that don’t have any skills. Seriously, God help you. I honestly wonder what someone who wasn’t tech savvy would do.
To make things even better, the technician told me that I was required to go to activatemyfios.verizon.net so that I could download software and agree to their terms of service. You know, I’m okay with agreeing to terms of service. That’s pretty standard fare in most service offerings. However, I have three issues with downloading bloatware from an Internet provider. The first is that no computer requires that stuff to connect to the Internet. The second is that software like that is typically loaded with advertisements and other junk that will try to hawk all sorts of services. No thanks. I use an anti-adware cleaner to keep that crap off my computer. I won’t voluntarily load it myself. Third, it’s pathetic that the software only installs on Windows. To humor the technician, I tried to run the software on my laptop that runs Ubuntu. Of course, the software installation failed miserably. After demonstrating that I couldn’t run the software, the technician informed me that I would have 30 days to run the software on a computer that could run it, otherwise they’d shut down service. Are they serious? That’s stupid. I’ll see whether or not they’ll cut off my Internet access due to the failure of their software to install on Linux.
On top of all this, Verizon apparently provisioned the line to only go up to 10 MB instead of 20 MB. Usually I’d be ecstatic that I was getting 10 MB download speeds, since I only had 768k before. However, I *paid extra* to have 20 MB, and I’m irritated, no borderline pissed that for all the hassles they’ve put me through, I’m only getting half the service I paid for. Of course explaining this to a customer service rep (after going through a gazillion automated menus) is next to impossible. They parrot back to me that the order *says* I bought 20 MB FIOS service, so therefore I *must* have 20 MB download speeds.
Yup, that certainly looks like I'm getting the 20 MB download speeds that I paid for.
It just doesn’t occur to them that maybe, just maybe, the order sheet is wrong. My offers to send them screen shots of Internet speed tests or any number of other metrics are so far of no avail. I’ve determined that dealing with the rank and file customer service rep (an Indian at some call center in Mumbai most likely) just won’t get me what I need. I’ve resigned to the fact that I have to move up the corporate food chain.
Overall, I think I’ve been pretty polite about all this. I didn’t get mad that during the first scheduled installation day, the technician called at 3:30 PM telling me that he wouldn’t get there until 5 PM, if at all. Yeah, I so didn’t mind wasting an entire day waiting for that call. On the rescheduled day, which was today, all the shenanigans I’ve already described occurred only after the technician spent over 6 hours trying to get FIOS working from the street to my house. To be fair to the guy, he had to spend a lot of time working on wiring and configuration issues that were skipped or left undone from the installation teams that were sent to my neighborhood ahead of time (with the logic that doing the work upfront would make individual installations faster). It seems incompetence at Verizon is institutional.
So for those of you who are wondering why I’ve been so silent today, now you know.
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Verizon have a long history of unfair service to their customer. The same thing also applied to me my ISP was Streamyx which they will give you have of what you paid for. It’s sad really.
At this point, I do have all my devices working with the router and ISP, but I’m still provisioned to 10 MB. :/ Again, I should be happy with this, if it weren’t for the fact that I paid for the 20 MB option, with the 10 MB option being less costly. If Verizon gave me the pricing for the 10 MB plan, I wouldn’t have complaints, but it irks me that I’m paying more for a level of service they sell for less.