Reviews:
 ·Verizon FiOS
| Bad experience with CavTel this past weekend I have a friend to whom I recommended Cavtel's $49.95 phone + DSL service in late 2004. He had the service installed and was using it happily for the past 15 months or so. Speed was not spectacular, but all in all, he was satisfied (except for the amount of taxes on a $49.95 bill, which is around $17 I believe, but I digress).
Well, a little more than a month ago, he moved in with his girlfriend, which is in the same town. She had a Verizon phone line, but no broadband. He called Cavtel right before moving, and they said they could move over his phone number, plus install DSL to the new house location. It would take a few weeks, but it shouldn't be a problem, or so they said. Cavtel piggybacks on Verizon lines anyway, right?
The modem arrived to the new house a couple of weeks ago (a brand new one...they never even asked for original modem), and I went over to the new house this past weekend to help him hook everything up as he's not too technically savvy. This is where everything started going to hell. I had no link lights. I called Cavtel, and gave them the phone number of said house. They kept telling me I was at on street and address that I had never heard of. I finally learned that in fact, CavTel did not port over the old phone number as requested. They gave my friend a brand new phone number, and said the old number could not be retrieved/used at this new location. That doesn't sound right to me...if that's really the case, that is NOT what they told my friend when he called Cavtel telling them he was moving.
Next problem was no link lights on the DSL modem. Well, they said since the house was currently using a Verizon phone line (which it was), we wouldn't get a link light until a Cavtel technician came out to the house to do "line detect" with the brand new phone number my friend had been assigned. Why didn't they make this clear from the beginning? I said "fine, when can someone come out?" They said on Monday, between 8AM-5PM. I don't know about you guys, but most people have jobs and can't afford to sit around waiting for a 9 hour service window. That was the last straw. We cancelled the order before it could be properly fulfilled. There's already a Verizon phone line in the house (his girlfriend's), so I told my buddy since they already killed his original phone number, you might as well just use Verizon for DSL service. I probably would have suggested this in the beginning, had I known there was a Verizon line already there. But, alas, he really wanted to keep his old CavTel phone number.
You know, perhaps if Cavtel had just been more upfront about the move process, and had been willing to work with us rather than tell us we need to call other departments to get answers, I would have give them another shot. But at this company, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. It seems like every person I talk with tells me some other department knows the answer to my question, but it's not their job to help me out. They make it extremely difficult to get anything accomplished. And I don't believe this is an abnormal behavior for this company, seeing as how my own "upgrade request" to Phonom + DSL has not been fulfilled, when the order was placed on Dec. 12, 2005. Nearly 100 days ago.
I can't recommend CavTel DSL to anyone on these boards. If your order gets processed properly, you might get a good reliable line (althought not nearly as fast as Comcast in the Northern Virginia area). But if something goes awry along the way, God help you, because no one at CavTel gives a hoot. They work harder to avoid helping customers than any company I've ever seen.
If you have a choice, choose someone other than Cavtel. |
