On 9/25/2011 2:42 PM, badgolferman wrote:
bob haller, 9/25/2011,9:03:54 AM, wrote:

I was a network technician for Verizon FiOS a few years ago. We
would get many trouble reports regarding some alarm systems not
working with the FiOS phone service for some reason. It had
something to do with internal wiring from the alarm box to the
house copper wiring. Hopefully you won't have that problem

my experience with FIOS SUCKED, the internet part worked fine, at the
time tv wasnt available yet..

the phone part was a nightmare........

echos, noise every 12th call or so, backup battery failure in less
than 4 months they wanted to charge me for that, my box beeped alarm
for over a week, drove us nuts, verizon reps didnt know there was a
silence alarm button.......

the the service was basically unusable, verizon held me to the
contract, refused to fix the problems, the worst the unusable noisey
call every 12th call finally traced to a bad router in the CO. to get
this fixed i had to call for 3 months, finally calling every business
day for 3 weeks only to be told every time it as my interior wiring,
even though tech number 1 noted problem reproduced with home
completely disconnected....

one road tech told his supervisor the problem was a bad router at the
central office, 3 months later a network tech finally called and fixed
it within 15 minutes.

moved the number over to copper, ordered verizon to STOP SOLICITING
ME.....

good luck with that repeated reps at door, got mad they woudnt leave
me alone, so i cancelled my outgoing call plan on my business
line......

idiots cancelled my entire outgoing line completely twice.

i changed phone companies over that and hate verizon.......

this is just a overview of the troubles i had, and misses a lot.

geez all i wanted was a working phone line

Your experience is not atypical. As an insider I got to see how the
buck gets passed continuously. The problem is with how management
places restrictions upon the customer reps and technicians. They must
meet certain metrics or get fired.

It seems to be the inevitable result of something growing to be a mega
company. They basically become a mini version of the government.

A recently had to call a smaller cable company with a technical
question. I was actually shocked when the CS person put me through to
their engineering department. The guy actually knew the answer and
provided me with accurate helpful information. If that were comcast or
verizon it would have been multiple fruitless attempts only to be
informed that they were mega corp and you were clueless.


An example, we have verizon DSL at a remote office. Because of the line
length it is on a lower speed tier. It worked fine for years and all of
a sudden we had frequent no connectivity issues that could be cured by
rebooting the modem. After hours of troubleshooting I found they had
provisioned the modem for a higher speed than could be obtained. After
hours on the phone I found that someone internally had simply made the
decision to do that on all DSL lines. Problem is the modem has a pea
brain and after hours of trying to get to the higher speed it locks up.

Then after arriving at the reason why no one was allowed to change it
back down to a speed that would work reliably. After a bunch more calls
I reached someone who actually had the authority to do it.


I was eligible for 20% discount on FiOS services and refused to get it.
I knew what would happen if something went wrong, especially if
something went wrong with the order which is the hardest thing to fix.

Having said all that, I will tell you the horror stories I heard from
former Comcast customers were worse.....