 Review by altermatt 
UPDATED: 210 days ago
member for 5.8 years, 1629 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 White Plains,Westchester,NY
 $35 per month (12 month contract)
 about 10 days
 Verizon
 "Stellar reliability, good price, fairly good speeds"
 "Very erratic quality of tech support; annoying fees & billing changes"
 "A good value with great uptime, IF you don't need tech support."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Have had VOL for a quite a few years, at the recommendation of a good friend who posts here a lot and guided me through the process. From order to SRD and live was about 10 days; it actually went live about a day before promised. If I didn't have my DSLR MVP friend to talk me through the early days of tweaking, it would have been a disaster; my first call to tech support the day my connection went live, was met with "I guess those are the best speeds you can get" (we're talking about 300/50; after tweaking, 2850/734!).
On two later occasions, I had to call, once to billing when I was trying to get the speed increase, and once to tech support when I was suddenly changed to interleaved from fastpath and wanted to change back. Both times I had to jump through unbelievable hoops and really clueless representatives before, in both cases, finally ending up with savvy people who made things right.
Since then, my connection has been out, briefly, only once, my speeds are consistently not far from the promised 3000 download, though uploads are around 715 vs. the 768 advertised; overall, the consistent speeds are more than acceptable. I'm using a Westell 2200 in bridge mode behind a router since I prefer a wired connection, though they also sent me a the newer wireless modem/router when I signed the new contract, which is a nice backup.
None of the people I know on cable enjoy anywhere near the reliability I've gotten, and though their speeds are significantly higher at the best times, when their neighbors are online, their speeds drop, which doesn't happen with mine. And at $29.95/mo. before fusf and taxes, it's a alot cheaper than cable in my area.
I am overall extremely pleased with Verizon Online DSL, and recommend it heartily, especially if you have savvy friends and DSLReports so you don't have to rely on the erratic quality of tech support.
UPDATE: Still no FIOS for our area, so cable is starting to look better...While I remain overall quite happy with the price/speed offering, and have not experienced an undue number of slowdowns, I have noticed that the speed does drop, sometimes precipitously, when it rains very hard. The drops are short-lived, and speeds recover nicely (still getting very close to the 3Mb. provision for download and a less stellar 715 or so for upload).
UPDATE 2: Reliability remains good, though upload speed seems to have dropped just a bit. BUT With cable packages dropping in price around here, Verizon's latest billing shenanigans, raising rates a few bucks for those of us who were "grandfathered" without a contract, and those insidious fees that change name everytime VZ gets slapped on the hand (they dropped the FUSF fee and added another fee a few months later), the previous "great value" is only a "good value" now. If they don't bring in FIOS soon, this longtime DSL evangelist may taste the cable offerings that are actually lower in price (for a year) and faster in speed around here.
UPDATE3: The horrendously low quality of tech support many of us have always experienced from VZ was highlighted during a recent major malfunction in the Westchester County, NY area. Down speeds suddenly dropped to an unusable level below dial-up (at one point 35k!); it turned out to be, as far as we know right now, equipment failures, that lasted days. But that's not the problem---stuff does happen, and reliability til now has been good. The problem was that VZ refused for many days to acknowledge the problem, and made many users jump through hoops, insisting they had spyware or other problems with their own setups, despite what I now know was thousands of calls about the same thing. Even after their own recording finally acknowledged the problems (three days into the outage), the tech reps were insisting there was NO problem, and the website status tool was either "this tool unavailable" or stated "no problems". Judging from the thread on this (3 pages long), by stonewalling and refusing to acknowledge or inform, VZ has lost some loyal customers.
So while I still feel Verizon DSL is a good deal, I repeat my warning that anyone who is not savvy enough, or connected with a savvy friend enough, to solve their own issues might want to reconsider. Thank heavens for DSLR, where savvy users can do for you what tech support SHOULD do.
UPDATE 5: Have not needed tech support since the last update. My biggest complaint now is that I can't get dry loop for the same price---I would MUCH rather have VOIP for my phone service (or up my cell plan), because Verizon charges an arm and a leg for just having phone service, BEFORE a single call is made. But it's a no go here.
FIOS is supposed to come to us soon. They are slightly more expensive than our local cable for now, though I just heard on the news that cable wants to RAISE their prices in response to FIOS competition---to allow them to offer "a la carte" pricing to people who want just basic access.
My speeds continue to be very close to my maximum provision, so still very happy there.
UPDATE 6: We are in the middle of an email outage, affecting quite a few people; in my case, all Verizon mail was down earlier in the week for a day, then back up, and today, only my main account cannot receive any mail (a strange phenomenon reported by others here). The worst part is that Verizon is not acknowledging any problem at all (even though some parts of the country have been without mail for days!), with nothing on their System Status page. THIS is my biggest peeve about VZ: their consistent refusal to acknowledge outages (which are rare, I must say) and long delays in fixing outages as their phone support continues to insist that nothing is being reported even as they are fielding thousands of calls.
My earlier reviews stand: excellent speed, excellent value, horrific support. And, for better or sorse, this may be my last DSL review; I'm getting FIOS (finally) next month!
Followup comments:  
ccbiggs
|  cable has back
 want to get a better rate,,, yes, all the broadcasters rates are going up in 08, but only by a few $$ .. with Comcast looking at cablevision , Verizon is trying to capture many customers with great offers and locked in rates, cable is under pressure loosing 500+ customers a day to Verizon, the only way they can keep their customers is through the disconect /retention department,,, usually they can only offer a 6month promotion, BUT,, if you call or schedule a installation with Verizon,, have a work order number... "" you call that department with cable,, tell them you want to disconect, tell them you are going to Verizon,, and give them the order # from Verizon-FIOS of all 3 services.. they then can offer you a 1yr. ( NEW ) promotion,, or in some areas out in LI, a 2yr is available..
want the lower rates before they go up- call today, get the work order number from FIOS - on ALL 3 services,, and they can make the offer, or else they can not do it..
the pepople who work there are under a lot of pressure, so much pressure, they keep having high turn over every month, due to the large amoutn of disconections,, look in the paper, every week for the past 6 months, they are allway hiring,, why is that,, they don't want to keep employees, it's cheeper for them to get rid of them and hire new for less,,, they will do what ever it takes to get rid of an employee after 6 months in that department, I guess right now - they are only focused on "trying" to keep customers, rather their employees...   | |
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