(picture related)
A month ago I decided that it was time to put Comcast to rest and move on to Verizon FIOS. There was nothing really wrong with Comcast, but the FIOS offers were simply unbelievable.
Yeah, I'm an idiot.
I ordered 15MB/15MB Internet service and was told that my delivery/installation appointment would be one month away. My appointment was today.
For the past month I was getting automated recordings from Verizon at least every week, reminding me of the installation date. I even took the afternoon off in advance, since I expected it to be distracting enough.
Then the shit hit the fan.
For starters, the installer was over an hour late. Once he showed up, he proved to me within minutes that he didn't know what the fuck he was doing. He insisted on going to my master bedroom closet, even after I told him three times that each of the 300+ units in our condo complex uses the HVAC closet as the communication lines tunnel, all lines enter each unit through the HVAC closet.
The installer got a little hostile, and insisted on checking the deployment box outside. Before I could open my patio door, he had walked out of the building and tried to walk around, which is really stupid since that had him walk 10 buildings down the street before the first opening that allows access to our back yards. Dumbass.
After some lecturing, he told me there was no way in hell he could get the job done. The fiber was in the attic, four stories above, and he would need access to each of the units above mine so he could pull the cable down. He also needed a power outlet in the HVAC closet, since there was none his solution was to run a power cord out of the closet, stapled to the god damn ceiling, across and into my living room and plugged into one of the outlets in my living room.
Dumbass x 2.
I offered him to get the engineering/facilities guys for help. After all, we have an agreement that allows them access to any unit for this kind of emergency. No, he replied, he would absolutely refuse to enter a unit unless the owner was present.
He ranted for a few minutes while Ivette was having the engineering guys get permission to enter each unit. She even got them to put a proper power outlet inside of the HVAC closet, something the Verizon guy did not think about. He left before she was back. Before he left he handed me a phone number to call to re-schedule.
It took one hour, and four calls, to make it to the point in which I could pick a new appointment.
"The next appointment we have available is April 27."
Let me get this straight: I had to prequalify to order this service. I ordered this service on March 1st, 2008, and I have to wait two months to have it installed because Verizon did not finish their cable runs as they should had?
Why the fuck do I get letters from Verizon every two weeks begging us to switch to FIOS?
I told her sorry, that's not going to work. Please cancel my order. It took another half hour, and two people, before I was done with the cancellation process.
Now, I am willing to allow the one-month wait to install the service, but them walking in here and deciding the place is not wired is just bullshit. If they know they are going to run a 4-6 hour service call (their estimate, not mine) then why the fuck can't they send a guy sometime in the four weeks before, to do a site survey?
How to do a timesaving FIOS site survey:
- Hand a qualified tech the address for a potential installation.
- Tech drives to the address, then asks the customer to allow him to walk through and look for the wiring cabinets, closets, etc.
- Tech inspects the point in which FIOS hits the property and sees if there is any work left to do before he can do the end user installation.
- Tech says goodbye and goes to the next address.
I imagine that for most inspections the tech can be done in 15 minutes or less. If he didn't find anything wrong, he can write a service note for the actual installer, to save him the hassle of figuring out where the cabinets and the entry point are located. If he finds something wrong, he has plenty of time to arrange for Verizon to fix whatever needs to be fixed.
Instead, we have technicians running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Assholes. And worse, they try to make it look like it is the customer's fault that there is a problem.
As soon as I was done with Verizon, I called Comcast and had them upgrade my Internet tier to 16MB/2MB, a $10 upgrade. This 16MB is before any speed boost. The funny thing is this is the third time in less than two years that I ask for the upgrade. For some reason they keep dropping it from my bill. The guy from Comcast was extremely nice, even after I told him that I almost deserted to FIOS.
"Uh, you don't want to do that."
Speed tests throughout the evening show me pulling 22MB/2.7MB. Fuck You, Verizon.
Questions for Verizon, not that I give a shit anymore:
- Why does it take a month to schedule an installation in the wealthiest county in all of the United States?
- Why are multi-unit dwelling deployments not going through some kind of quality assurance process? At the very least, Verizon should send somebody to make sure that their wiring contractors are deploying the right equipment.
- Why not spend some money to train your customer support personnel?
- Would somebody post a memo that just because a phone number is used for the account it doesn't mean the phone is a Verizon account?
- Do you find it acceptable to have technicians that refuse to listen to knowledgeable customers? Especially when the customer has information that can make the installer's job easier?
- How come Comcast has service appointment time guarantees and you don't? Comcast techs (at least here) are very timely and courteous. Your installer was sort of an asshole.
- If a customer calls complaining about a fucked up installation about waiting for a month, is it wise to tell said customer that the next available appointment is almost a month away? Shouldn't this be a red flag situation to try to appease the customer by trying to right a wrong and come up with a better service appointment reschedule?
- How come you guys spend so much money sending those begging letters without checking if the service is really available at that unit?
- How come you guys spend so much money on marketing and can't afford a site inspection ahead of an installation appointment? I am guesstimating an expense of up to half a billable hour per each installation, which is already budgeted at 4 to 6 hours.
- How come Verizon doesn't talk to condo associations and their engineering folks to preempt deployment issues at large condo complexes? All it takes is to send one engineer to visit each condo area and take a look at the possible floorplans. A recent college grad should have been able to come here and, in less than two hours, visit the three standard unit layouts, and maybe write a half-page cheat sheet to be used for any FIOS deployment to any of these 300+ units.
7 comments:
no offense, but this is all whine. fios is a pain to hook up and all, but you're judging your whole experience with this from the worst possible perspective. sounds like your installer was just some lazy shmuck. i'll admit it took verizon about 3-4 months to connect me to fios when it first came out in this area, but coming from comcast, it was well worth it. i did my speedtests and latency comparisons (using online games) and fios just wins hands down. i also have a web server and ftp running (which comcast used to constantly harass me for). i sympathize with you for your troubles, but this post is extremely biased and offers no real content for picking comcast over verizon.
It may be all whine, but think about how much better your situation is:
1. It took you 3-4 months to get connected. I got pushed over my limit at the knowledge of having to wait a second month.
2. You are running web server and FTP in direct violation of the terms of service of Verizon FIOS.
3. You chose to make your post anonymous, mostly to protect yourself from #2 than to exercise your right to privacy.
Finally, my post clearly says "fuck you, Verizon." Telling me that my post was biased is equivalent to telling me that the sky is blue or that corn pops are yellow.
If you're now just realizing that all Pedro does is whine, you really must be new here.
We got Verizon in Denton, TX last year, and about 3 weeks after it was installed on our street we signed up. Took a week and a half for an installation crew to come, the dug a trench in our front yard, laid our fibe, ran it to our southwest corner and installed a board in the laundry room. They then installed a line outside all the way up to the second floor, cut holes in our building, ran the line along the ceiling, under our carpet, and to the back of our TVs. All in about 3 hours. I moved to Seattle about 8 months ago, where FiOS is unavailable. Comcast was my second choice. And over the last 8 months, I've never wished to have my FiOS back more than every time comcast sputters, dropps my k/sec in half, or cuts hour for hours all together.
EVERYONE should have the privilege of having FiOS offered in their area. Simply put, nothing else compares.
What you just described is the kind of experience I was hoping for. You waited a week and a half for them to do the fiber run to your house from scratch. My whole condo complex (300+ units) has been fully wired for FIOS for over a year. Verizon had this contracted out so every unit would have a fresh run of fiber, so a tech would only need to add equipment at the customer's unit. One of the things that kills me is that they blew so much money on this deployment and didn't have anyone check to see if the work got done.
On your installation day, all the work was done in 3 hours, and it looks like they did a lot of wiring. On my installation day, I got a rant from the installer, who was an hour late and refused to work with my engineering people to overcome the issues at hand that day.
I live in one of the front lines of the battle for residential broadband services. We were one of the first places anywhere in the country with cable modems (Jones Communications, Fairfax County). A couple years later they had deployed fiber to the curb throughout the county. Just overnight we were converted to digital cable, and cable modems arrived at the same time. In the 8 years since I have had my Comcast account, I can count my outages with one hand. There have been so few outages that I actually freak out if the modem ever breaks lock.
Yet, as awesome as it is from the technical point of view, they were the only game in town for too long, so we all were eager for FIOS to arrive with some competition.
Can anyone tell me what the installation box looks like when Verizon installs this service? We are having it done in our condo building. I am not signing up for the service but we're all being asked to install the set-up in our bedroom closet. Is it just some non-intrusive wiring or is it a large box?
As far as I can tell, they will install two boxes, one with the signal, one with a backup power supply. You will need to make sure that there is a power outlet available wherever they decide to install these two boxes.
Post a Comment