| They only changed the label It's hard to imagine that any major North American phone company could be more dysfunctional than Verizon. Except perhaps for the Verizon spin-off called Fairpoint. The politicians said they had to approve the "sale" of Verizon's New England assets to Fairpoint, but this involved a stock swap which many have called a merger. Some analysts say this was only done to exploit a few regulatory loopholes and gain a $600 million tax writeoff, but I don't know much about that. What I care about right this moment is service, since that is what I don't have.
Living with Verizon was hell: they repeatedly changed our internet service tier to a lower speed but continued to bill us for the faster service without notification. We were forced to tolerate hourly network outages for months because they refused to believe that an intermittent DSL carrier was due to a fault in their equipment. Instead of sending out a repair tech, they just argued with us for months until they were finally proven wrong by a network engineer. Then they swapped our main voice number with another customer. For all that we had to put up with, we never even got so much as an apology. Even worse, they offered new customers a lower rate than we were paying. And that's the short version of this tale of misery: I won't bore you by detailing the bureaucratic insanity of Verizon customer service any further because it has been thoroughly documented by countless other victims. Things were bad enough to begin with, but when they moved to Bangladesh it was utterly intolerable. Enter Fairpoint:
Recently we were notified that our Verizon e-mail accounts would be transferred to a Fairpoint server. Regardless of whether these companies are owned by the same people, we figured things could not get any worse with a new management team, so we decided to ride out the transition. In terms of e-mail, that occurred on January 31. Fairpoint said we would only have to change the domains in our e-mail client configuration. No problem, eh? But you know the price of allowing monopolies to control the market: nothing Verizon does is ever done right the first time, and Fairpoint is shaping up the same way. First of all, I can still check for mail at Verizon without an error but don't see any new messages. That's because they are forwarding mail to a duplicate account on Fairpoint's server. And this is what they said they would do. What they did NOT bother to tell us is that they changed the mail passwords too... and now they won't say what those passwords are! Fine, I thought--I will just go to the Fairpoint web site and reset them. Well guess what? That doesn't work either. So here is the situation so far:
-I cannot use the "manage account" feature of the Fairpoint web site because it won't let me log in.
-I cannot access mail through the web interface. It won't let me log in and there is no error message explaining why.
-I cannot contact Fairpoint technical support on the phone because the line has been busy for days.
-Nobody is answering a "live chat" request on the website after 10 hours of waiting in a queue. It does not say how many people are waiting ahead of me and there is no indication the chat service is even working (which I seriously doubt).
When I called Fairpoint Customer Service, the agent said that all of my complaints were valid: the fault was not on my end and people have been calling them for days about the same things. But they could not help and told me to call tech support (which they admit cannot be reached because the lines are perpetually busy). From other web sites I have now learned that 285,000 customers in three states have been affected. So there you have it: for the past 3 days several crucial business e-mail accounts have been disabled by Fairpoint and nobody will help us resolve the problem. They did not even acknowledge their mistake on the website and let us know not to waste our time on its broken account management features. They just decided to sweep this under the rug and graciously allowed me to spend 3 days trying to figure out what went wrong. How charming! But even though a legion of e-mail accounts are out of service and the local economy is losing thousands of dollars a minute, and the account management features of the web site are disabled, and they don't have enough people to answer the phones in tech support, Fairpoint still has resources to spare to update the horoscopes, weather and celebrity news on their home page! (MyFairpoint.net)
My god... these people should be hung by their toes and treated to a deep anal probe with an electric cattle prod. They had a YEAR since the merger to get their servers working properly! What in the world have they been doing for all of this time??? Did they think they were going to make these problems go away by pretending they don't exist? Do they really believe that by keeping us in the dark it will make things better? If Fairpoint's web site is going to be used for anything besides managing accounts, at the very least it should clearly explain service interruptions to customers which they have stranded. I pay them to carry my data traffic, not to create a cheap imitation of the Yahoo web portal. I don't care what my romantic "energy level" is supposed to be for today, I just want access to my subscriber account settings!!! Why was that issue not handled FIRST, before they started adding frivolous junk to their web site?
Is Fairpoint going to reimburse me for all of the time I spent on this issue? Are they going to compensate me for the business I lost because I could not respond to mail inquiries? Don't bet on it. Even a class action lawsuit will typically result in millions for the attorneys and a tiny, token settlement for the customers. I know it's like this all over, and that's what this post is really about: Are we going to put up with lousy, overpriced phone service forever, or are we going to do something about it? Some people claim that Fairpoint told them to take their problems to Verizon and Verizon just said to call Fairpoint. That is probably not company policy, but these shenanigans are just a few examples which illustrate how the regulatory system is broken: they demonstrate the need for a radically different approach which strongly favors competition. The existing duopolies are just too big to manage, even if they meant well (which is rather dubious, considering how they penalize us with higher prices for comparison shopping on individual services...and how they charge extra for things which cost them nothing to provide, like Caller-ID...and how they charge many people different prices for the same services in an attempt to squeeze the public for every last dime). We pay outrageous prices for lousy customer service because we keep re-electing career politicians who sell their vote to the highest bidder. But some of our legislators are merely uneducated. That is the real value of forums like this: the knowledge is available to anyone who wants to understand what is really going on. There is a better way to govern private companies that use public property, and even if this will not be addressed by the current regime, it's never too soon to start talking about it:
US NEEDS MORE BROADBAND COMPETITION
"Other countries with higher speeds and lower prices have generally taken a different route than the U.S. (...) many countries in Europe require incumbent broadband carriers to share their lines with multiple competitors... The European line-sharing approach is modeled after the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996, but that approach was later abandoned by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in favor of the network operator being the lone broadband provider. The Telecom Act has been "a huge success-in France," Windhausen said. (...) An ITIF report from May found that the U.S. paid more per megabit of service than 17 of the 30 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The average download speed among consumer broadband services in the U.S. is 8.9M bps, according to the OECD, slower than average speeds in 18 other OECD countries."
»www.thestandard.com/news/2008/11···ert-says
WE NEED MORE COMPETITION, and that is what we need to keep hammering on if we really want to fix this broken system which eliminates the incentive for companies to provide quality service.
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PS. (Service outage day 4). The Fairpoint e-mail accounts have just started working. Now I can use the 'Manage Account' feature too (sort of). There were "security certificate" errors, the page does not display properly, everything loads EXTREMELY slow, some of the spam filter preferences were changed, and the 'Sign Out' option is not functioning at the moment. This just confirms that the problem was on their end. But some customers still don't have access. So it looks like some progress is being made but instead of the transition being complete on January 31 as originally promised, it's more like the transition began on that date. It also looks like we are getting billed about 25% more than the published rate. Meanwhile, mainstream news articles about the service outage have begun to appear online and in print, but it seems like Fairpoint is trying to downplay the scope of the problem and exaggerate the role of customer errors. They acknowledge some "bugs" and "glitches," but are determined to avoid specifics. I suppose all of this should come as no surprise: as the old saying goes, "the more things change, the more they remain the same." |
