Thursday, January 23, 2014

FIOS failings, Part 2

Following up yesterday's gripe, here's a very telling portrait my current Verizon FIOS service, as of 9:22 p.m. this evening:
4.19 Mbps.  Four.  I run a small business out of our home and we pay over $80 a month for 50 Mbps service.  We are currently getting less than one tenth of what we're paying for. 

Test run at this site.
Here's the corresponding service outage map, which I screengrabbed from Verizon's own site just after I did the speed test:
No service outages self-reported by Verizon in the greater Houston area, despite the fact that this outage has persisted for weeks
Something is truly rotten in the state of Denmark.  Verizon has given us the run-around for weeks.  My husband spent yet another interminable about of time on the telephone with "Customer Service" (I use that term loosely) this evening, only to be told next to nothing, just as he was on previous occasions.  Apparently there is an internal outage code or number attached to this event, and that was described to him as TXEDGE5003637.  But when I search for that on the internet, or just the numerical suffix 5003637 within the context of Verizon FIOS, I find nothing whatsoever.

The only thing that "Customer Service" could tell my husband was that they suspected that this problem is not localized - they think based on Verizon's internal coding that it's actually Houston-wide.  Maybe not every customer, but widely distributed.  If that's the case, I can't understand why there's not a major uproar in progress.

Tomorrow during business hours, I plan to send this information to a few consumer advocates at local media outlets, just in case there really is a larger story here.  And also, if it's a widely-distributed problem that's been dragging on for weeks, perhaps a class-action lawyer would be interested in asking some questions.  The way I figure it, Verizon owes me at least fifty bucks and counting, for failure to provide service as agreed.  If there are a lot of customers affected, the effective damages could start looking like real money. 

All I want to know from Verizon is whether or not they intend to restore service, and if so, EXACTLY when - no more blowing smoke up my skirt for weeks on end, saying oh, it will surely be fixed "tomorrow". 

And if they simply do not have any intention of resuming service, then I'd like to have that confirmed so that I can begin what'll surely be a long, arduous process of getting my money back and switching to another provider.  That's all.  Normal business stuff of the type in which any halfways-functional service company should be well-versed. 

1 comment:

  1. My husband called Verizon again today and once again was not given much useful information. Reportedly, Verizon is in the process installing some kind of "new circuit" for users in League City. They would not reveal to my husband how many users were impacted, but they admitted to getting "lots" of complaints lately. No ETA on when this will be fixed.

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