> I've had it with Verizon. I am on the brink of getting the internet service cut off.
I feel your pain, and we’re in the same boat; after having been on FIOS from the moment it became available here (2008 or a bit before), we’re already looking to move back to Comcast, as we’re now so fed up with the unbelievably degraded service, lack of proper customer service, not to mention paying out more in money (considering our package) than we have been receiving in service for some months now.
Not trying to get off on a huge tangential rant here, though it seems appropriate I share this for the benefit of any others experiencing the same issues. Oh, and by the way, your numbers look better than ours do; not to say yours are great (they’re not)…Just that ours are ludicrous. If I were an avid online gamer, the latency alone would have pushed me to another service months ago.
The quality of our Internet connection has been going steadily down the drain, starting around the end of last year. Besides not being able to do any large downloads (or even surf the web) while simultaneously watching Netflix (doing so drops the stream quality visibly; it goes from medium-quality to low…And I can walk over to a friend’s house who has cable, and they still get streams in at X-High/High, just as we used to), things are now at the point where what used to take minutes takes hours – e.g., downloading a 4.3GB ISO of (insert linux-distro-here) over FIOS is now one of those tasks I have to start at night and generally it’s completed by morning (!). I feel like I’m back on an ISDN (hah).
To pre-empt questions, we use wired connections, all the cabling was done professionally (and I recently had all the ethernet cabling re-tested by a technician), and the only machines connected to the network in our single-family home are two (2) MSOS workstations (one is a laptop, and isn’t always connected), and two (2) Linux workstations, again, one being a laptop (and not always connected). That, and a PS3.
I personally have over a dozen years in the IT field (trained in POTS, CTI, etcetera – while I don’t do cabling for a living, I know the specs of the different categories, for example); that said, I also had a friend of mine who has been doing networking and security for the Feds for about a decade go over things here, so it is safe to say that nothing on ‘my’ side of the wall/CPE is an issue.
We’re paying for 25/15, and per every test – even the one on Verizon’s site – are getting an average of about 5/3. Not that I mind paying for services…However, I *do* take issue with paying for services which are not being rendered (or which are rendered one-fifth, at best). The first Verizon rep I spoke with had the gall to say “Perhaps you should upgrade to a faster package” -- I nearly lost my cool.
While I’ve not been able to get through to what I’d consider even L1 support, fast-forward to yesterday: the last conversation I had with a Verizon rep (who, naturally, wouldn’t even put me through to a technician, only putting me on hold while she spoke with them), this time, I had my friend sit in on this conversation with them on speaker phone: he’d brought a brand-new laptop with him, and as he is far more hands-on networking than I am these days, he’s an excellent **bleep** detector.
I was as polite as possible, given that we’ve been paying outrageous amounts of money versus services rendered, only to be told they would send me a new Actiontec. We pointed out that even the CLI tools demonstrated the massive slowdowns to be directly *after* the Actiontec here; I even logged in to the router itself and used their diagnostic tool to ping Verizon.net, Google, Yahoo, etcetera, with the ping number set to 100. All had packet loss, all showed lags maxing out circa 150-190 ms. She offered to send another Actiontec out.
Before the conversation was over, I finally just came out and said “Does Verizon actually have any interest in customer retention?”
After a pause, she briefly muttered “Sorry” – incredulously, I repeated the question, and after a longer pause, she said “yes”. And then she rushed me off the phone, and that was that.
So, after having been a FIOS customer since at least 2008, they have finally dropped their quality of service so low that we’re left with no choice but to switch services…Which should serve as an answer to whether or not customer retention is important to them.
Again, pardon the rant, however, the point is that we’ve spent the last few months being jerked around and given poor service…All the while, still making payments to Verizon like clockwork. I just hope others experiencing the same runaround while being billed aren’t as foolish as we’ve been: switch sooner rather than later.
Oh: Spoiler Alert – replacing their router did *not* fix the problem. Imagine my utter lack of surprise.
End of rant, and I just hope this proves informative/helpful to others.
Regards,
~J
