No Freaking Internet for the 3rd Day Now!! (FIOS)

You're dealing with the phone company, and they are morons.

I have high speed "business class" DSL at work. There is a river near my office and the phone company building is on the other side... so despite being close geographically, it's a long wire because it goes all the way downtown, across a bridge, then back up-town to the phone co building. They installed a fiberoptic link to let the uptown part of my city get internet access. It is *always* going down. Whenever the technician works on the fiberoptic repeater, they screw it up. So they try to fix my internet, but they break someone else's. They try to fix someone else's, they break mine. The main problem, besides them breaking it, is that you have to call Verizon and sit on hold. By the time you go through their silly process to get to where you can actually schedule a technician, hours have gone by - and the technician will be scheduled 2-3 days down the line.

Verizon are one company I wouldn't mind seeing go under. They are so disorganized and incompetent, frankly.

I've had good experience with Comcast cable internet service... I've had nothing but had experiences with Verizon. FIOS is faster for internet than cable though, but they are both very quick. YMMV. Good luck getting it fixed!

 

you might have a problem canceling your FIOS since they do usually rip out your old copper wiring in order to run the fiber line.

 

Thanks for the warning ...I was about to order it ..but now ...I won't!!!!!

Hey Verizon ...Customer Service is important....you lost me as a potential customer!!!!!

Thanks,
UZY

 

That's NOTHING. I lost my earthlink service for 6 months when they switched local servers. SIX FREAKING MONTHS! I finally canceled and ironically, got Verizon instead.

 

Last week, my home phone was out from Monday thru Friday and the internet was spotty at best. The CS people were not informed what caused the outages so they couldn't do a damn thing.

Time Warner cable sucks!

 

I agree Time Warner sucks... but realistically what can we do ? Not much...

 

Time to pay the bill!
Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

My FiOS goes out occasionally. When it does its only the internet. Once they had to replace the entire board/hardware gizmo(s) hanging on the wall in the garage - they come pre-mounted so the it was pretty quick. Still, what'd that cost them? Bigger problems with the DVR they gave me. Sometimes it gives sound but no picture. Have to unplug it to reset the whole thing. Getting to the plug is a real pain, so I usually pull the plug on my whole system. My wife thinks the entire setup is stupid - the insane remotes and this resetting the system when no picture comes up... and I agree. They can reset it remotely if I call, but it wipes our Favorites and I'm tired of resetting those!

 

Is there a way to keep a traditional phone line in case of emergencies?

 

No, I tried to keep my home fax line on a copper wire connection and just move my home phone line to the FIOS phone+internet+TV fiber optic line. Verizon would not do it. Their motivation for investing in the fiber optic infrastructure is to rip out your old copper lines when they do the install. This helps in 2 ways: no old network for them to maintain and no easy way for you to move your phone land line to a competitor (other than wireless or cable phone). I ended up moving both phone lines to the FIOS connection.

I complained like crazy because the FIOS sales guy said I could keep the fax line on a copper connection when I originally signed up for the FIOS service. A few weeks later, on the day of the install, they made it clear that was not an option - regardless of what the sales guy committed to. At that point I had only 2 choices: cancel my entire FIOS install and stay on copper phone lines or move both phones to the FIOS connection. I chose the latter choice - I really had no choice at that point.

Having a land line on FIOS for emrgencies might be a good idea. At least you'd have 56k dial up through it.

My FIOS reliability has been good. However, if the house has a power outage, only the phone line works. Verizon installs a battery pack which gives you something like 12 hours of phone use before it goes dead. In this mode, the TV and internet connections don't work but the phone does. After this happened to me once, I moved the Verizon fiber switch/hub to a circuit powered by my emrgency generator. Now I have TV + internet + phones during a power outage.