Verizon, Fiber Or Die?

dynamator writes "I live about 550 meters from my Verizon central office. I pay for their higher-tier 'Power Plan' DSL service, which boasts 3 Mbps down and 758 Kbsp up. For the past year, I've enjoyed excellent performance on this line. However, this past month Verizon has been hooking up my neighbors with FiOS, their new fiber-to-the-home system, and guess what, my connection speed and dependability have taken a nosedive. What can I do to build the case that this is really happening? Will anyone, least of all Verizon, care? Are they making me a fiber offer I can't refuse?" We discussed a few times last year what Verizon may be up to.

They won't care

[fernir]

I worked for Verizon as a level 2 tech in their call center located in Columbus, Ohio for 2 years. They will not care you can keep complaining and complaining and nothing will ever happen, mainly because no one really gives a shit about the customers and all they care about is how fast you can finish a call.

There's no winning with some people

[QuantumG]

Seriously, you have the option of FiOS and you're complaining about your non-FiOS connection? Upgrade, and consider yourself lucky that you have the opportunity to do so!

Horrible Customer Service

[mduckworth]

You know I read all of these comments about how people would kill for FIOS. And I've also heard bad things about comcast, but I'm here to tell you, Verizon's customer service and billing is THE WORST! I ordered fios a year ago, got it put in and all was well. Then I move to a new home where fios is also available. They charge me a $90 "installation charge" that 3 reps insist is right, but the 4th rep says is wrong and that it should be $30. They screwed the activation so I called to get the order number to do it online and the rep sent me a new router and added a $140 charge. So they autobilled my credit card something like $280 this month... FOR FIOS INTERNET ONLY! Both verizon tech support and billing were supposed to send me a return label to return the new router and NEITHER SUCCEEDED! They are AMAZINGLY incompetent. They will transfer you around time after time to the wrong department. They don't listen to a word you say. The hold times are better now, a month ago I was holding over an hour to get through to anyone. For what it's worth the installation was top notch at both homes as has been the service. Just hope you never need to call them for anything... ever. You'll be sorry.

At least you can get FiOS...

[SuperBanana]

...because in Boston, which just so happens to be the silicon valley of the east coast (and has been for decades), I can't get FiOS.

Why? Verizon is holding the entire city hostage and refusing to do a fucking thing until they get a state-wide cable TV franchise license so they don't have to play on the same field as the cable operators (who have always had to negotiate per-town.) Look at the verizon deployment maps; it's a sea of blue and green, except for a giant void near Boston.

They've fed all sorts of bullshit to people; at one point, they were claiming that they were not doing "metropolitan areas." Funny: I guess New York City and DC aren't metropolitan areas? Everyone in the burbs and even the boondocks in eastern MA gets FiOS, but no, not Boston...

no competition = zero customer service

[jjzeidner]

this is what happens when you employ policies that virtually eliminate market competition in favor of granting 'sweetheart deals' in return for the ability to snoop the network whenever you please. Telco is perhaps the most corrupt it has ever been in American history. Joshua Zeidner [joshuazeidner.com]

Line interference or impedance

[MyBrotherSteve]

It's possible that if this all started while, or just after, they got done digging up the neighborhood to run the fiber, that they accidentally did something that is causing line interference or an impedance of some sort. In this case, a line technician would be able to determine an actual physical problem with any of the lines. Obviously, a phone call to have them check won't hurt.

Re:Have you called them?

[jcnnghm]

Expanding on this a little, I know when they were installing FIOS in my neighborhood, all services (cable, telephone, electric) were up and down repeatedly because they kept accidentally cutting lines. Chances are, there isn't some great conspiracy out to get you, but the contractor that is installing/installed the fiber accidentally cut your line, then did a half-assed job fixing it. You should probably call the contractor and let them know they made a mistake, and call Verizon and let them know about the problem as well. Again, when they were installing mine they repeatedly left the contractor information as well as the Verizon installation support number on doorhangers and postcards.

Re:You do not deserve fiber!

[Inner_Child]

Emphasis mine, words yours:

Road Runner just went to 8 up 0.5 down. That's not a typo.

So the way to cover your stupidity is by lashing out at someone else?

Fishers center!

[Durrok]

Yes, I was a manager at the fisher's center. I used to take negative escalations all the time for this. In short, we can't do anything for you besides schedule a tech between 8-5, M-F. Oh you can't take time off work? Guess we can never get it fixed then! Oh, you took time off work to be there but the technician didn't show? Better take another day! Ridiculous...

Re:AT&T and Uverse

[Adambomb]

The shortest list of all is the list of phone support services that do not currently suck big time.

Average Handling Time plus Average Value Added Service per call == even when getting assistance for a faulty service you're a commodity..

Re:They won't care

[rkcallaghan]

DraconPern wrote:

It's not Verizon that is pushing that metric. It's the outsourced company that is trying to make a buck off Verizon.

If I pay you to do something (Handle as many calls as possible for as cheap as possible), how am I off the hook when you do it?

~Rebecca

Re:If I were you...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

A good friendly neighbor might let you in for free. Or for a fraction of the monthly fee. All above board. Might even be legal.

Oh stop

[Sycraft-fu]

I get real tired of people getting up with this national pride over Internet. So you got cheap Internet? Ok, great. How much does your apartment cost? How large is it? My condo is 167 square meters (1800 square feet). It has a nice courtyard with a pool, a large parking lot and so on. I own it, I don't rent, the mortgage is about 78,000 JPY (760 USD) including all taxes and such. So how's that stack up to your place?

Now I'm not trying to brag here, I am making a point that different countries are, well, different. Even different areas of the same country are different. So it is great that you can get cheap Internet access, but have you considered everything involved in that? Have you considered that your situation might not be the same as everyone else's? Is it even the same in all of Japan? Can you get that same access in, say Tono (which despite being rural for Japan is larger than many US towns)?

Another part to consider is are they really giving you 100mbit Internet, or are they giving you a 100mbit connection to a WAN that is connected to the Internet? What I mean is generally speaking in the US, when you buy a connection you get the given bandwidth to anywhere. Your connection to your neighbour is no faster or slower than to anywhere else. The ISP has sufficient upstream to support that to their backbones and so on. So with my 10mbit link, I find that I get that to pretty much anywhere that also has sufficient bandwidth. It isn't just things on my network, it is anywhere on the Internet.

Well in informal testing, I've found that isn't always true with foreign ISPs. I remember several years ago when I worked for network operations on campus, I was testing with someone in Sweden, they were on a DSL service called BBB. 10mbit to the home, which at the time was pretty high end. However, they got crap connections to us, about 256kbit. Well, the problem wasn't on our end. I checked the routers, they were all fine, I checked the links, they were all low usage (below 20%), I tried transfers to a number of known high bandwidth sites in various places, all went fast.

A little playing around revealed that more or less BBB was a huge WAN, like we had on campus. They provided a high speed connection between you and them. So anyone else on the same ISP you got blazing fast speeds to. However they didn't have the bandwidth to support it to the rest of the Internet. So if you hopped off their network, things got much, MUCH slower.

So is your situation similar? It wouldn't surprise me if it was, because larger links cost lots and lots of money. It isn't a linear scale. While 100mbit gear is pretty cheap, if you have a bunch of people on 100mbit, you can't have a 100mbit uplink. If you do, that means that they'll only get their full rate if they are the only on using it. That don't mean you need dedicated bandwidth per person, but you do need more than what they each get. So while 100 people x 100mbit doesn't need a 10gbit uplink, you probably should have a 1gbit uplink, maybe more. Well the same thing is true at higher levels, and it starts to add up pretty quick to needing some real big links, if you are actually offering people that speed to the Internet.

Otherwise, you have a situation like we do on campus. I have a gig connection to my desktop at work. The switch it is connected to has a gig to our firewall, that has redundant gig to the building switch, which has redundant gig to the distribution switch, which has redundant gig to the core, which has redundant gig to the edge. However I wouldn't say I have a gig net connection. Why? Well two things:

1) At each of those levels, the connection is only a gig, but I am sharing with more people. Our building probably has 500 computers in it, the distribution switches it connects to probably handle 50 buildings, and the whole campus connects to the core switches. So while I could get a gig all the way to the core, I could only do it if I were the only one using it. In reality, I have to share with lots of other people.

2) We d

Re:There's no winning with some people

[budgenator]

Can they provide connections to 911 during a 2 day electricity outage over fiber?

Re:Fishers center!

[couchslug]

Care to share the exact verbiage a customer should use in describing a problem to get service?

Part of getting service from anyone is leading them to a default choice that serves you, and that means
describing your problem in the right terms.

Re:You do not deserve fiber!

[ScrewMaster]

Apparently it's written by a somebody who calls himself Google. So, yeah, it's written by Google. Maybe just not the Google we all think of when we hear that word.

Re:You do not deserve fiber!

[darkpixel2k]

The only thing I love about Comcast that the other providers don't have is no stupid 2-year lock-in.

I can get comcast out to my house, sign up for service, use it for a month, and then disconnect. No worries, no fees, no nothing.

It's the same bitch I have will cell carriers. Why the fuck can't I go out and buy my own phone and attach to your network for a month or three of service?

Seriously. If your cell/internet/cable network is soooo awesome, I'll *WANT* to stay with you. I shouldn't have to lock myself in for two years...