comments on review of Verizon DSL → Re: Completely FRUSTRATED

Put an egg in your shoe and beat it.

Actually, he has a good point. Nothing is 100% foolproof, and in case something goes wrong, you ALWAYS want to have a backup plan. You wouldn't save important files to your computer and not save any backups to disk, would you? I always advise my customers to have more than one dialup connection on their computer as a backup plan "just in case." One dialup connection may go bad, or one service may be down. There are way too many free services out there to be complaining about "not being able to work" unless your DSL is up and running. Otherwise, nobody else in areas where DSL is not available would be able to work, either. Plus, I hear sob stories every day about how someone is losing 1,000's of dollars an hour (doubtful) without their DSL, and I can't help but to lose sympathy for these people. I constantly wonder why someone would base a large business on the reliability of a $30-$50 consumer account that may experience problems and not have a backup plan in case of outages -- especially when business accounts with better reliability and faster service is available for about $20/month more + an extra dialup option.

And I've also heard the "I'm paying for it, but I ain't getting it" argument. FYI, Verizon does credit it's customers for any downtime as long as you have called in to tech support (1-877-222-2375) and had them document it during the time of the issue.

Every service is bound to experience some downtime, so what's the excuse for NOT having a backup plan?

You're right, yet this is not EASY ENOUGH!!
If I was able to switch to DU, or god forbid, see an automatic switch, that would be worth $3.99 a month.

Since MY local network is finnaly running smooth (six months of problems, 3 straight up months), I would have actually paid for DU without ever needing it, and I would never use it.

Bart

Not trying to sound like a smart alleck, but how would you suggest making it easier? As for a VOL DU connection, you aren't bound by contract to keep it for as long as you have the DSL service. In fact, you can order it when you need it, cancel it when the DSL service is working again, and you only pay for the time that you used it. Any DSL tech can also help you out with setting up a dialup connection. Just make sure that order entry or billing gives you ALL of the dialup info before you get off the phone with them. They have a terrible habit of giving you a password and access number and then telling customers that tech support can just automagically look up the rest (not always true). This usually causes a long and drawn out process when we have to search about 6 different databases for your dialup username. (If this is added by billing, they may put it under your email username, which usually starts with "res", "vnz", or "vze".)

When I suggested a backup dialup connection, though, I was also including free services, which you may also be interested in. You don't pay for those at all.