robor-
Over the years VERZION was one headache after another. It was not so much India-based support that irked me with hard to understand conversation, but the "hard" mistakes that were made.
It is true that dialtone was usually a given, but with everybody here having cell phones the other intangibles were more important to me than that. It probably started going downhill about 7 years ago. I had dial-up internet with Internet Junction, a local oufit. I could never get 56K dialup to work, the best I could do was around 24k. I called Verizon tech support and found that after a test my line was measured as a 40 out of a possible 200, dirty. Of course there was no fix for it, so I had to live with inferior signal for both data and voice. My international calls were never crisp, just ok for the most part. But the worst was the constant snafus. My wife would get on the phone with them and after about 3 hours of holding, rerouting because she was transferred to the wrong department (and had to hold 20 minutes to find out) and explaining what was wrong over and over would be completely exhausted at the end of the call. We were overbilled rather than underbilled (I wish) about 5 times a year, in need of dreaded calls to rectify.
My FIOS experience has been equally horrid. Of course, I won't search out FIOS threads or sites to "warn" prospective customers ad nauseum, but that's another topic.
I signed up for FIOS in May. There have been 4 outages so far and 3 billing issues, since yesterday a 4th one.
Outage #1: No internet. Call to Verizon. "Must be an issue with your modem. we'll send someone out." Turns out the Dlink modem/router had burned out after just a couple of months. 2 days without FIOS. (My neighbor has RR and I moved my laptop close to that side of the house to piggy-back onto his wireless to at least check email.)
Outage #2: No internet. Call to Verizon. "A fiber cut in Florida has resulted in service being out for the entire state. We are working on the issue..." All day outage. Late at night it comes back on. Two days later a recorded phone message apologizing for the issue and a promise to compensate somehow. Of course, no compensation was ever given. When I asked about the promised compensation I was told that was a different department, nobody knows.
Outage #3: No internet. Call to Verizon. Maybe the modem? "But you guys just replaced it recently." Hmmmm. Let's do some testing. "Looks like your outside line is not getting internet." Next afternoon the outside line had to be rebuilt. 1.5 days without service.
Outage #4: No internet. Call to Verizon. "Your service does not exist, it has been cancelled as of last night." "Say what?" Turns out a billing issue gone haywire started an automatic process of termination. What was the issue? Well, when I went to "naked" FIOS I had to give them a credit card. Somehow the credit card was not entered correctly. However, since May SOMEONE ELSES credit card was charged with my service. When they discovered the mistake the months of service charged to THAT PERSON'S credit card were credited back to him and my account went into default. Of course I had no idea this snafu happened to them, so I was flabbergasted that without a phone call or email announcement my service was turned off. I spent 4 hours on my cell (driving between appointments) last week getting to the bottom of this issue with this crappy company. At 1:30 PM we finally got the issue rectified, the rep apologized for the comedic error parade, my credit card was billed properly. I was told that service should be back on within 2 to 4 hours, but that in this circumstance they would work dilligently to speed this up, as it was their fault. However, to add insult to injury, on my way home that evening around 7:00 PM I found out from my wife via cell that internet (which means also internet phone) had not returned back yet. Called Verizon again to find out that someone bungled the work order and left it sitting there. I held on the phone until the rep got with a guy in the "turning on" department and it took another hour until that was done. I could call that day's outage Outage #5, but it technically was still related to the issues related in outage #4.
As you can imagine, billing problems again galore, part of these problems. They lost my credit card info. Some other guy was charged with my account month-by-month. The latest: Yesterday I received a postage-paid label to send back my equipment. If I don't do so within 30 days I'll be charged $99. I NEED the flipping modem to continue getting FIOS service, and it would be patently silly for me to comply and send the modem back just to receive another modem to continue with the service, let alone service interrupting. So, since they are so absurdly incompetent, I have to get back on the phone to explain to these idiots that I did not cancel my service, it was a cancellation by error and I am once again a FIOS customer. If I don't subject myself to the phone torture I will undoubtedly be charged $99 and perhaps my service will be once again disconnected.
I am probably going to switch to Roadrunner, away from the disaster VERIZON. The truth is, if there had been a phone service that allowed me to ditch Verizon while costing the same (we spent around $100 each month between local, interstate, intrastate and international, including signature number package) I would have done that gladly.
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