ramandala
Premium
join:2006-03-14
San Dimas, CA
 ·Verizon FIOS
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| Verizon FiOS was a BIG MISTAKE for me too!
I too had a similar experience with Verizon FiOS centered around a seemingly simple upgrade to 15/2. I made no less than 25 calls, but 60% of those calls were answered by a machine telling me that Verizon was closed. Mind you, it was between 10am and 2pm in California. It took two weeks, countless broken promises and three supervisors to finally get the upgrade placed.What did I learn? Well, first of all their software sucks so if a web order or telephone order for the upgrade fails to be completed by Verizon, it takes an act of God to be able to fix it. Their software will not let the employees delete a pending order. And, it will not let them change a pending order. Nor, will it permit them to place another order if one is pending. The aggravating thing is that nobody in tech support and customer service understand this. They kept promising me that it was an easy issue and an hour later, I was told: "Huh, try again tomorrow." It wasn't until I refused to get off the telephone with a supervisor that she assigned a trouble ticket with "Offline support." Remember that if you are in a similar situation. It took offline support about four hours to remove the pending order to free the system to accept a new order. See my full review of FiOS, but suffice it to say, FiOS may be the Golden Calf. I had about one week of intermittent 100% loss for hours at a time. Verizon blamed it on "my router." Yet, I had to remind them that it was THEIR router. Thanks to smokeping monitoring, it has been fairly reliable for the last week. Speeds are about as promised. with FiOS TV, the media center STB has a novel feature that lets you play back recorded TV via the regular STBs. While this is a great idea, they did not program the regular STBs to be able to communicate a "record" instruction to the media center. Clearly they want you to rent more DVR STBs. Also, the media center has a pitifully small hard drive. It only records about 16-18 hours of standard definition content.Verizon FiOS telephone is much clearer. There is almost zero background noise and louder volumes. In fact, the install tech warned me that I'd probably want to turn down the telephone volume after he switched us to FiOS.Now, with the install, the cable crew ran the fiber from their box through my yard to my garage. And, they only buried the entire length of it six inches deep. And, it is not in conduit. It runs right through my landscape, sprinkler lines, etc. So, when I accidentally slice it in half when I'm working in the yard, you can imagine how much they are going to want me to pay to replace it. |
