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Review by TheLawn 
Posted: 26 days ago
member for 26 days, 1 visits, last login: 25 days ago
 Thousand Oaks,Ventura,CA
 $35 per month (36 month contract)
 about 3 days
 Verizon
 "It works...."
 "It doesn't work well... about 1000-1300ms latency just to the local router."
 "In my oppinion, complete garbage..."
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The only other options are slower dial up... or much more expensive...
I ordered a 3mbps connection... but in the 2 years I've had it I haven't seen it reach near that point.
Contacted tech and customer support so many times it's not even funny, they just don't seem to care.
As soon as the contract expires I'm gone.
Worst decision I ever made.
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Review by radiomaze
UPDATED: 27 days ago
member for 29 days, 8 visits, last login: 4 days ago
Curwensville,Clearfield,PA
$43 per month (12 month contract)
about 10 days
Verizon
"Connection is fast and reliable"
"Tech support is terrible"
"Good for the money"
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I ordered the 3MB down and 1.5 MB up package. My speed averages 2.88MB down and 1MB up. Not bad considering how far away I am from the CO. The only other broadband choice I have is satellite.Installation was a breeze no problems what so ever.My modem is a Westell 6100. My worst experience was with the outsourced broken english speaking tech support. In other words the tech support sucks! But all in all after 5 years of no affordable broadband and having to use dial-up, I'm happy.
Although with the dreaded tech support, they wanted a one time fee of $89 for the Tech 2 "expert" people, just to help me change 2 UDP ports. I need those ports for a special VOIP program I use. I said to the "expert" what he could do with the fee. But in a polite way of course 
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Review by pseudo
UPDATED: 28 days ago
member for 55 days, 19 visits, last login: 18 days ago
Brookline,Norfolk,MA
$53 per month
Verizon
"Used to run fine (6 months ago)"
"Runs extremely slow during peak hours (6PM-12AM)"
"Verizon has major network congestion issues, avoid them"
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For the past 6 months or so my DSL connection has been running extremely slow every day without exceptions between the hours of 6:00PM and 12:00 AM. During this time I'll get around 300kbps downstream for a connection rated at 7Mbps.
A back and forth with Verizon tech support resulted in them sending out a tech 3 times to my apartment. The tech was unable to find anything wrong with my local connection. He concluded that it was probably a network congestion problem and had me switched to a less congested router. The switch had no effect at all which means that all their routers are congested. In fact, simply looking at the forums here at this site confirms this as many people from different parts of the country complain of the same issue. It's pretty obvious to me that Verizon is aware of these issues (how could they not be?) but figures most people don't notice so it's not worth it to spend the money to upgrade their capacities.
If you live in the Brookline, MA area, there's really no reason to go with Verizon DSL since both RCN and Comcast have connections that go up to 20Mbps for the same price Verizon charges for 7Mbps.
Bottom line:
Avoid Verizon DSL. If you use them, be sure to run speed tests during peak hours to ensure you are getting a consistently acceptable connection. If you find that you're not, switch immediately to a different provider and save yourself the tedious hassle of leading yourself to my same conclusions.
Update:
After calling them to cancel, they had the gall to charge me a termination fee. Unbelievable. "Well the contract states that it provides speeds up to 7Mbps". Yea fine, I don't expect a perfect speed all the time but I at least expect something reasonable (i.e. between 3 and 7mbps).
And by the way, the DSL companies always like to brag that cable is shared but DSL is not. This is completely false as once your unshared phone line reaches the CO, it's shared with everyone else. Yea sure, maybe it's not shared in the immediate neighborhood but who cares. What matters is the bandwidth pipe that you connect to and DSL's is as shared as cable's.
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 Review by perki
UPDATED: 31 days ago
member for 357 days, 404 visits, last login: 1 days ago
Santa Maria,Santa Barbara,CA
$29 per month (12 month contract)
about 790 days
"None"
"Lied To Me For Two Years"
"Worthless"
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I signed up for there 3mbps package back in 2005. For 29.99 a month. I considered comcast but at the time you needed basic cable if you want there internet. So i choose verizon. Not bad if you compare it with 24.99 AOL Dial Up. Boy was i dumb back then. I had no idea old phone lines kill data speed. But that's not the worst part. They over Charge by leaps and bounds. First my contract expired and they raised my price to 39.99 a month! They never called to warn me and i never check the bill cause its on auto pay. After i found that out i canceled right away and switch to comcast. Every Now and then i go to the verizon site praying FIOS has come to my town and of course I'm let down. : ( So i went to see if they lowered there dsl prices and they have but they no longer offer the 3mbps tier. So i called and pretended i was signing up with them and confirmed that they did not have it. What company gets rid of there highest tier? The Answer is of course one that could never provide it to begin with.
So how much many did they suck out of me lets see. Charging $10 more for a package that they could not provide for 12 months is $120 okay and charging $10 more because of a contract expired for 13 months $260 and if you add the two that's $380 dollars!!! Wow that can buy a xbox 360, Guitar Hero World Tour with tax and then go out for a $20 steak. LOL
But it's all done now and no I'm not going to sue. Its my fault for putting full trust in a company.
Just try to avoid if you can.
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Review by hmagoo
Posted: 33 days ago
member for 39 days, 9 visits, last login: 27 days ago
Palm Desert,Riverside,CA
$20 per month (12 month contract)
about 10 days
Verizon
"I am getting 1M/384k service to my house for $20/month, incl. tax/fees."
"I have only DSL service, so billing is a bit strange and apparently crippled."
"Overall a great value for my needs."
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I had TWC Roadrunner since it was initially offered in my area. I used that service for 5+ years. I found it to be completely overpriced and pretty unreliable. If it was free I might have been happy with the quality of the service. Additionally, I no longer desired to pay more for a faster connection.
About a year ago I switched to Verizon DSL Dryloop service. I don't have home landline phone service, so ordering/pricing/checking availabilty was a bit confusing. There are more than a few complications from Verizon when only having a dryloop DSL account. There shouldn't really be any. Billing is different and options are limited more with this type of account. I get no paper bill, and the website does not show the bill in a reasonable time after its in effect.
Customer Service wise, the install was smooth. Tech Support is not the best, but I only had to use them once or twice since I have had the service.
I did have the opportunity to call customer service and was very happy with my experiences. Verizon had made available better services at similar prices after my one year contract had ended. I was able to get the newly advertised prices and speeds without much of a problem, although I think it did involve a decent amount of attention from the service representative.
I never notice any connection problems, or speed reductions while using this service. My ping times are relatively consistent and low. The Westell 6100 Modem/Router provided with the service is reliable and has proven useful when I needed to use it in different capacaties as a router or bridge mode, firewall, etc.
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 Review by bokamba
UPDATED: 34 days ago
member for 7.6 years, 3341 visits, last login: 1 days ago
Falls Church,Falls Church City,VA
$28 per month
about 14 days
Verizon
"Reliable connection, decent price"
"No static IP, slow upload, slower speeds if you're far from the CO"
"Price is less and less competitive for the speed we get"
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Ordered 768/128 DSL in March, over the phone. It took them at least a couple of weeks to get everything set up and to send us the equipment (it's free self-installation), but the service has been smooth.
Equipment they gave us: Westell WireSpeed DSL modem, and 5 microfilters, which was enough. We had to purchase our own network card to connect the modem to our PC. For me (a pretty experienced computer user), the installation was no problem.
Sadly, they only offer PPPoE using WinPOET, but it's not too bad for my purposes. The most annoying part of it is that you have to run a program in the system tray just to be able to connect.
Once the service was set up, I noticed that the download speeds were pretty low. Thanks to DSL Reports' Tweak Test and the DrTCP utility, I was able to get the connection up to full speed, but it would have been nice if Verizon had provided me with this information.
So overall, Verizon has been good to me. I recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to worry about long service contracts or smaller ISPs that might go bankrupt, a la Northpoint.
UPDATE: I ditched WinPOET, and started using RASPPPoE. It's much better!
UPDATE: As of Jan. 2003, no issues, other than the fact that RASPPPoE occasionally screws up (or maybe it is Verizon's fault). Nothing serious.
UPDATE: Jan. 26, 2003 -- service has been slow today. I'm almost positive that it's on Verizon's end, but after spending a long time on hold, the tech wasn't very helpful and told me (after trying one thing that failed) that she couldn't help me since I don't use their PPPoE software and I don't have their default settings on my computer. How ridiculous.
UPDATE: Jan. 27, 2003 -- Found out that the service problems appeared related to packet loss. Talked to an intelligent tech (no hold time!), who helped me out greatly. Seems the problem may be with Qwest rather than Verizon; when she switched me (temporarily) to a Genuity account, the speeds and line quality went back to normal. If the problem doesn't go away by week's end, I'm going to switch my GSP from Qwest to Genuity.
UPDATE: March 16, 2003 -- The packet loss problem went away. Sticking with Qwest, although given their financial difficulties, that could be a mistake.
UPDATE: May 28, 2003 -- I've taken advantage of the new $34.95 per month rate, but I'm too far from the CO to get faster speeds.
UPDATE: August 20, 2003 -- The packet loss and latency problem is back. This time, I can't even get through to tech support; I am disconnected because there are too many people on the lines, and this has happened for 2 days in a row. I have downgraded my rating of their support.
UPDATE: April 23, 2004 -- I'm thinking that Verizon should put in a new CO to make faster DSL available to me, but they haven't. Actually, our neighbors directly across the street can't get DSL for some reason!
UPDATE: August 4, 2004 -- We've had connection reliability problems recently. Not acceptable, and tech support hasn't been helpful.
UPDATE: November 24, 2004 -- no problems recently. We aren't able to upgrade to a faster tier, though.
UPDATE: June 5, 2005 -- we upgraded to the 1500/384 tier about a month ago, once it was made available too people at our distance. We also started having intermittent sync issues possibly related to the higher speed. After some troubleshooting on the phone today, a ticket was opened to have the network folks check our line out more thoroughly. I had a good experience with the support folks today (3 different people since the line got disconnected twice, not Verizon's fault), so I'm upgrading my rating of the tech support. I'm downgrading my rating of the connection reliability. We might have to go back to the slower tier since our modem is apparently working at 97% of capacity at the higher speed tier.
UPDATE: June 10, 2005 -- a very friendly, very experienced tech came to the house today (two days late). Bottom line: we're really, really far away from the CO (perhaps as much as 20,000 feet, and the wire in our neighborhood is 26-gauge, which is thinner than DSL prefers. So we're going back to the lower speed tier in the hopes that it will bring back connection stability. But now our upload speed seems to be 75 kbps, when previously it was always at least 128 on the slow tier. The technician was a great guy; knew his stuff and did it quickly. After he finished, we chatted on a whole variety of unrelated topics for quite a while.
UPDATE: January 4, 2006 -- things are still running all right, though it seems like disconnections have become an issue. Still waiting for FiOS to be available; that will be a much better deal once it comes to our neighborhood.
UPDATE: March 30, 2006 -- switched to the $15 per month plan, since it's at the same speed. It's a 12-month contract, but that shouldn't be a problem. I estimate it'll be about $20 a month once taxes and fees are added.
UPDATE: February 13, 2007 -- No connection problems. The 128 kbps upload speed is definitely a more serious shortcoming nowadays.
UPDATE: May 21, 2007 -- Connection is perfectly stable but 128 kbps upload is killing me. Waiting for FiOS, which will hopefully arrive eventually.
UPDATE: January 12, 2008 -- Still working fine, still waiting for FiOS.
UPDATE: April 14, 2009 -- Connection is stable and we're getting the speed we pay for (768/128). FiOS is supposed to arrive in our neighborhood soon.
UPDATE: October 20, 2009 -- Connection is stable and we're getting the speed we pay for. FiOS is now available, but costs about $12 more per month, so we are waiting for further price reductions before we switch.
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Review by freddesite
Posted: 36 days ago
member for 47 days, 26 visits, last login: 16 days ago
Richmond Hill,Queens,NY
 Business customer
$25 per month (12 month contract)
about 7 days
Verizon
"The connection stays on all the time 24/7 literally!"
"The speed is not up to par, always lower than what you pay for."
"Good company high price bad service."
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I have had it for two years. I had Netzero dsl before it with 1.5mbps. The change to verizon was slower reponse. The speeds are low but not too much that you can't operate a youtube video or something. But i have yet to see an outtage. So I guess that makes up for the speed because of what i hear about cable.
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Review by twgbf
UPDATED: 40 days ago
member for 2.3 years, 1018 visits, last login: 1 days ago
Utica,Oneida,NY
$30 per month (12 month contract)
about 21 days
Verizon
"Stable connection"
"Top speed for me is only 1.5"
"Still good value for the money"
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10/15/09 update:
My dsl is still going strong. No outages or slowdowns. I added Direct TV service for a triple bundle and said goodbye to Time Warner. We're very happy with this setup.
5/28/09 update:
My phone discounts expired in December so I changed my service to a double freedom bundle and my download speed was increased to 1.5. My dsl has always been solid...no down time since I've been with Verizon. The few times I've called tech support this year have been positive so I gave them a little better rating.
Rumor has it FIOS will be in Whitesboro (a suburb) later this year and shortly after that in Utica. I've noticed different wiring on the telephone poles around town and some large tan boxes on some of those poles. Sure hope that FIOS.
11/27/08
Called and got an upgrade to the 1.0 speed. I had to change from the $14.99/month for life to $19.99/month with a one year commitment...still a great deal for an always on connection. Speeds are very steady with a better upload and it's never been down since I got it. The fastest dsl speed in my area is 1.5 for $29.99 so the 1.0 speed is definitely the better deal. Unfortunately FIOS will not be here very soon.
1/10/2008 update:
I was able to get the price for life online. Took several tries though.
1/8/2008 update:
My dsl has been solid since I got it. No down time...steady speeds...all I really need in an internet connection.
After setting up my mother-in-law's computer for the $14.99 for life 768 speed dsl I was impressed with it's performance and price. I just do email and surf...no heavy downloading. I could very easily live with the slower speed. And for $14.99 a month? Great price for what you get.
I called Verizon billing to see if I could downgrade my speed to the 768/128 from my current 1.5 speed for the for-life price. They told me that offer was for new customers only but they could give it to me for $19.99 a month which I declined. Since I was not on a contract I told them I would rather cancel my dsl (I'm still on Roadrunner). They transferred me to the cancellations department. I spoke with a very nice lady who offered me the 768 service at 14.99 with a 1 year contract. She also gave me a reduced price on my phone service for 6 months. I accepted that and plan on calling them again when each offer is up. Too bad you have to play these games with them.
Roadrunner has gotten their act together and also finally gave us a speed increase this month to 10/1 but at about $45 a month. I called them to cancel a few months ago and they immediately offered me $29.99 a month for a year to stay which I also accepted. I still have the kids living here and they like the higher speeds. I use the dsl and the kids use the cable...every one is happy. When they move out and if the Verizon connection is still steady I will just go with that and cancel the Roadrunner. Probably will have to haggle with Verizon every 6 months or so to keep the price low.
Original review:
I have been a long time cable user (Adelphia and then Roadrunner) but the switch over to Roadrunner was a bad experience in the Utica, NY area. We would lose connection or it would be dial-up slow and my voip (ViaTalk) would not work. I decided to switch back to Verizon for phone service and also decided to look into dsl as a backup connection. Since I was also getting phone service it took a little time to be activated. I've been on Verizon dsl a little over a month and it's been a stable connection with no down time. I have a Westell 327W modem/router. It took a few calls to tech support and a few visits from a technician but now I'm getting a consistent 1.5 down (too far to get 3.0). I don't notice much of a difference doing what I do over the internet vs Roadrunner (about 3.5 down). Cost for dsl is $19.99 for 6 months (then 29.99 after that). I also went with a Freedom Essentials plan for $24.99 for six months. After six months it'll change to a Double Freedom plan. If the connection remains stable I'll drop Roadrunner and just go with Verizon. I may not be saving any money with a Double Freedom over a cable/voip setup, but I have a stable internet connection and reliable phone service and that's what I want.
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Review by HarryH3
UPDATED: 40 days ago
member for 4.7 years, 1295 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Georgetown,Williamson,TX
$22 per month (12 month contract)
about 20 days
Verizon (ex GTE)
"Cheap, reliable DSL"
"Bait and switch speed/price - See text"
"Meets my needs"
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See Update at bottom:
I called and ordered their advertised 768k/128k service for $14.95/mo. First I was shocked to find out what a ridiculously long time it would take for them to get it installed on my line. When the service was installed, I was getting 3Mbps download speeds. Pretty cool, until I got the bill and found out that they were charging me over $30/mo for that speed. However, when I requested that they downgrade my service to the 768k plan that I had originally ordered, they absolutely REFUSED to honor the $14.95/mo price that they had advertised, since I was no longer a "new" customer. Instead I got $17.95/mo plus all the crap fees that they tack on.
The installer was great. Friendly, efficient, and even knew what he was doing. 
Their phone support is abysmal, especially their "support" for Verizon-provided MSN. Blech!
The good thing is that my speed always tests very close to the advertised 768k down/128k up and has been extremely reliable.
Update 01/10/2009: Just upgraded to the new bottom speed tier of 1M/384k. The modem provisioning changed while I was still on the phone with the customer service rep! Price had creeped up over the last 2+ years, but this new "upgrade" dropped my DSL bill back to $19.99.
Now my browsing isn't killed when my kids are watching stuff on YouTube in the other room
Update: Oct. 2009. Switched to FastPath mode to reduce ping times. This made online gaming work better for my son. I didn't notice any difference for my use.
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 Review by onDvine
UPDATED: 40 days ago
member for 4.8 years, 2376 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Los Angeles,Los Angeles,CA
$29 per month (12 month contract)
about 3 days
Verizon (ex GTE)
"The connection has been reliable"
"Occasionally the modem needs to be powered off and on again"
"We're satisfied with it"
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We switched from Time Warner Cable's (formerly Comcast) broadband to Verizon DSL about 2½ years ago because it was more economical and friends said it worked fine for them. We're at the lowest tier, but don't notice it being slower than TWC's service was.
About a month ago we lost our connection for 4-5 hours. The tech support person was pleasant during half an hour spent trying to fix it before learning there was an outage in our area.
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Verizon Online DSL
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I have 3M as do others in SM/Orcutt. Obviously your to far away from a CO or RT for it. So you don't pay attention to your bill for years and then complain ?.. Enjoy your crappy over compressed Comcast TV and over priced, Capped, and throttled Comcast HSI. 
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