Verizon - clueless and disconnected
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Verizon was supposed to have FiOS connected in my area about 2 years ago; we're still waiting. They're running a special land line/tv/intermet package now, so I hit the web to see if they ever wired up the area.
First, they demand a land line account/phone number. But what if you're not yet a customer? Well, you can search by street address, so I enter mine. We cannot find your street address. Really? My Verizon wireless bill arrives every month just fine! Ok, I enter the cell number and search by that. Does it tell me if FiOS is available? No, they bring me to the manage-your-account page, with no way to get FiOS availability.
Fortunately, they have a number you can call. Unfortunately, it switches over to the main service line at their end, and the regular support folks have no way of knowing if the service is available (at least that's what they claim). And of course, if you call the business office, it's closed on the weekend. Ok, so I called during the week, and the best they can tell me is: we don't know when your area will be wired for this service. Since then, I've gotten 3 auto-dialed calls, 2 human calls, emails and now snail mail trying to sell me FiOS service that isn't available to me.
I hate Cablevision, but at least the service isn't vaporware.
*sigh*
</rant>
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If the business people couldn't tell you when you're supposed to have service available, you aren't on the schedule. At all.
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FiOS roll-out is taking awhile in densely-populated areas, from what I have heard. The problem is laying enough fiber in already packed tunnels. If I moved to the suburbs I could get FiOS in a heartbeat but if I stay in the city, I'm boned. Luckily, it appears Comcast finally has DOCSIS 3 available in my area, so perhaps I will go that route. I'm not sure if I actually need 50mbps compared to the 20mbps I have now, but it's so damned tempting.
Oh, and FWIW: the "check FiOS availability" tool is worthless for me as well. I don't have landline phone but when I enter my home address it tells me I already have existing landline service and should use my landline number. From what I can tell, though, FiOS isn't available at all in my city. Superficial inspection of my building's basement shows no new fiber connection, either, so even if it was available on my street I'd still have to wait for the property management company to get off their ass and permit installation. Considering the age of the building, running fiber to individual units would be difficult anyway.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Oh, and FWIW: the "check FiOS availability" tool is worthless for me as well. I don't have landline phone but when I enter my home address it tells me I already have existing landline service and should use my landline number.
Obvious solution: Find a neighbor who doesn't have Verizon landline and use THEIR address in the dumb utility...
They seem to have similar problems telling potential customers whether or not DSL is available in their area. When we were looking for broadband 2 years ago, they told us that they'd check and call back. Days later, they called back and said that they didn't do DSL in our area. (obviously BS - some neighbors already had Verizon DSL for quite some time...) A while after that, a salesperson called back to say there was a mistake, and DSL is available here after all. He was sort of disappointed to hear we'd already signed up with Comcast...
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@joemck said:
Obvious solution: Find a neighbor who doesn't have Verizon landline and use THEIR address in the dumb utility...
I've got the opposite problem here in the UK. I'm in the process of purchasing a house, so I went to the Virgin Cable site to check availability. Enter the house address, it says 'service not available'. WTF ? There's a manhole cover in the street right outside the property, and cable boxes on several neighbours. Enter one of those addresses, it says 'service available' ! I'm guessing the tool only includes properties with the final street-to-building connection, in which case connection is 'free'. Nowhere on the site is any mention of costs for those final few meters, or even if it's still available. I'm hoping it's just a connection issue, rather than capacity.
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@snoofle said:
Verizon was supposed to have FiOS connected in my area about 2 years ago; we're still waiting.
I feel your pain. Verizon was supposed to have FiOS connected in my area about 2 years ago; we're still waiting. That having been said, this is Verizon we're talking about. Reading their customer feedback, I sometimes wonder if maybe they're doing us a favor.
On the bright side, at least Verizon isn't sabotaging their own effort by wiring to thousands of neighborhoods on the basis of a single customer, like Sprint did with their ION service. (It'd still be nice if we had the impression they were recording who wants it, and going into a neighborhood when they had enough interest.)
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@tgape said:
Verizon was supposed to have FiOS connected in my area about 2 years ago; we're still waiting. That having been said, this is Verizon we're talking about. Reading their customer feedback, I sometimes wonder if maybe they're doing us a favor.
I gotta say, my experience has been very different than all the complaints about Verizon. Of all the companies I've had to deal with regarding customer service, they've easily been the best.Every call seems to answered by someone in the US, who speaks clearly and has to neither ask nor be asked for anything to be repeated. Issues were dealt with quickly. We've had FiOS for about 2 years now, but we've had land lines, DSL and wireless for several years prior to that.
@tgape said:
(It'd still be nice if we had the impression they were recording who wants it, and going into a neighborhood when they had enough interest.)
I was somewhat surprised that my neighborhood got it when it did. I moved about two years ago, and it wasn't the greatest area, but they put FiOS in there, and at about the same time, it was put into the neighborhood where we moved (a nicer overall area, but similar level from a subdevelopment point of view).I wonder how many people actually subscribe, but then I can see several wireless networks from my living room, so it may be quite a few. I live in townhomes, with a park behind my house, so it's denser than you'd expect from single family homes, but nothing like an apartment complex.
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I had the hardest time trying to see if I could get.... well, any sort of services, cable/dsl/phone/FiOS/Uverse (the AT&T equivalent) when I moved into a new rental home early January. Turns out that the area I'm in had just been annexed in late November, and (I guess) no one understood the address as being part of a city (they all expected it to be unincorporated).
