Tell me about Verizon FIOS....

Factual Questions
1

…and why Verizon’s database doesn’t seem to have my house .

Here’s the story: I want to get FIOS and so I called them to ask about it. For some reason, they said they didn’t have it for my location. That can’t be right, I live in a very urban area in LA. It’s not out in the boonies somewhere, it’s right in the middle of a city

To make sure I have access, I went over to a friend’s house who has FIOS and checked out the black box that’s connected to the phone lines, and the gray FIOS box in the back of his house. I’m sure that the telephone pole right next to my house has one of those fiber optic cable boxes (I’ll get some pictures of it this weekend if someone can check and make sure its the correct box). My black box looks exactly like his: kind of rectangular, black, with an orange tag or lettering on one side.

The funny thing is, my boss at my company has the exact same problem. He called to get FIOS but Verizon said it wasn’t available at his house. But he knows his next door neighbor has it. Apparently, Verizon’s database on the availability of FIOS isn’t very up to date so they often tell people they don’t have access when in fact they do. I believe that’s what’s happening to me as well

My friend said to just lie and say my neighbors all have it and create enough doubt in the receptionist’s mind so that she’ll send out a technician to confirm. I can’t just ask for the tech; I tried that and she was adamant about me not having access, so I have to find another way to trick her into coming.

Has anyone had this same problem? What do I say to get them to come out and check if I really in fact have availability at my house?

2

I had this problem with Verizon DSL for the office. I called the line for Washington and got Pennsylvania. They lectured me on dialing the right line and transferred to me to New York. They couldn’t figure out how to transfer me to Washington, but transferred me to the national center. They recommended that I call the Washington line, which is the number I started with. When I insisted they try to help me, they couldn’t find the address anywhere in their database, even though I know the previous tenant had used Verizon DSL there.

My advice: use anything but Verizon, even if your second-best option is Morse code.

3

I called to ask about FIOS availability at my house and was unceremoniously told “No”. When I asked why the rep explained that because ATT provides service in my location, FIOS is not available there. They do not compete in the same locations, no overlap.

This sounds pretty silly to me - if you’ve got a superior product I’d think you would be chomping at the bit to make it available to your competitor’s customers.

So if this is (IMHO misguided) policy is true, perhaps you happen to be right inside a “no service here” border?

4

I hope not Valgard. To think that the fiber optics is just sitting there, mocking me…its too cruel to think about!

dracoi, I’ve thought about using Time Warner’s Roadrunner service, but that’s going to be my last resort. In my area, it’s just these 2 companies and Verizon, if I can get it, is faster. Also, it’s hard to look at Morse code porn. All those dots and slashes, like some kind of S&M horror shop…

5

Well you see, there are two separate topics here: Verizon (the company), and FiOS (the product).

Verizon’s technical and customer service is labyrinthine. As long as you are doing the routine stuff - calling to pay a bill, add a service, change or remove some kind of service - that can be done completely online, through set-top box or on-screen or phone push-button menus, you’re probably OK. Go even slightly off the beaten path though, and you’ll find that not only does the left hand not know what the right hand does, they’re willing to actively debate the existence of other body parts (if they’re in the mood to talk) or to transfer you right back to where you just got transferred from (if they’re not).

Dracoi’s anecdote about calling a support number, getting transferred twice (no doubt with long periods of waiting and being put on hold) and “lectured” about calling the right number before getting transferred back to the original number and getting essentially an answer of “despite the evidence of both of our senses and the fact that we’re having this conversation, you don’t seem to exist”… Is very typical of my own experience and those of others I’ve talked to. Not ALL of our experiences were like that, mind you, but we all have had at least one.

BUT, FiOS is indeed terrific stuff. Much much better in picture quality than my former digital cable service with Time Warner, because the bandwidth is much higher. By PQ I mean much less compression noise on the high-def signals, or “jaggies” and freeze-ups in playback even while watching live TV.

If you’re watching mostly “standard def” shows, you won’t notice or care. If you’re watching HDTV but sit farther away than about 2.5x the width of your image, you probably won’t care either. For example, if you have a 42" diagonal HDTV in the standard 16:9 aspect ratio, that’s a 37" wide image; sit more than about 7-1/2 feet away and you wouldn’t notice any compression noise anyway.

But, if you watch mostly hi-def from up close, FiOS is great. For me, my dedicated home theater space is set up where I’m sitting at the closest recommended distance - 1.5x the image width - for maximum immersion. And in that setup I’ll tell you, FiOS is very, very clearly better than the HD image I used to get with cable. They pass through the signal from the channel provider with no additional compression, so while a “cheaper” HD channel like “Animal Planet HD” might show some blurriness, watching a marquee event on a premium channel such as the Super Bowl or a movie in HD on HBO is very nearly Blu-Ray in quality.

The max internet speeds are faster too. I never really had a problem with my download speeds with Time Warner, but upload speeds for publishing digital photos and the like are definitely faster.

I’d been unhappy with the PQ of my digital cable service for a while so soon after they dropped the early termination fee, I checked for FiOS availability with my phone number at this web page and called them to schedule an appointment. Evidently, I was pretty happy with the end result. Then, 10 months after I signed up, I got a knock on my door from a guy in a Verizon van proclaiming that “FiOS was now here” on my block. He had no idea I was already a FiOS customer.

And that’s not my Verizon customer service story, which I won’t get into - that had to do with finding out the proper steps to take to transfer my old phone number of about 10 years to my new FiOS service. Which, in the end, suffice to say, didn’t happen.

6

That’s strange. I have a friend who lives in east Los Angeles County. He has FIOS for internet, Time Warner for cable and a while back, AT&T was setting up for U-verse.

7

FIOS and AT&T overlap in a few select areas. FIOS has often been accused of cherry picking and a lot of this “gentleman’s agreement” between Verizon and AT&T will probably fall apart eventually.

The thing is, you can only make money by serving your customers so long. Eventually the ones that signed up will. You can only raise rates so much, eventually you need MORE customers. This will drive AT&T and Verizon to go into each other’s territories where they normally kept out of.

While it is collusion, it doesn’t meet the legal definition of the word, so both companies are in the clear from price fixing, and cherry picking accusations, but covering just enough of each other’s territories.

8

I only have Verizon DSL, though the FIOS wires have been sitting on the telephone pole I can see out my window right now, mocking me as they have been for a few years. Since I am frugal, I haven’t upgraded (I don’t even have cable TV).

If I had more money, I might switch to FIOS just to stop the 5 or 10 pieces of junk mail and 1 phone call I average every week trying to sell me on it. Not to mention a similar volume from Comcast.

I do read this broadband message board every so often and feel better when people bitch about their FIOS problems. Sometimes people post some really helpful stuff about outwitting Verizon’s attempts to thwart them when they try to get service or support. They also have regional boards that might help you:

9

It’s not collusion it’s franchise agreements. As you might expect it costs a few dollars to build out a network of copper and fiber and it also costs a few dollars to maintain it. Nobody would build out a local network if they knew their competitor could come in and poach it. You talk about price fixing, well I can say out here in Los Angeles it’s a different story. I have some mountaintop communications sites with phone lines for basic service in the event of an emergency. They both have metered service with no long distance and unpublished listing. One site is with Verizon (nee GTE) and the other AT&T (nee Pacific Bell). The cost? $22 a month for dialtone only from Verizon and $14 from AT&T.

Although the telcos have managed to poach from cable by offering TV, as the cable company now offers phone service and poaches telco customers, ironically FIOS customers are VOIP and not on a “real” copper POTS line

10

Just because you have the “fiber optic cable box” on your telephone pole does not mean that all the other infrastructure necessary to support FIOS has been rolled out. I take it that none of your neighbors has FIOS?

11

From what I’ve read it is collusion. They both have agreed “informally” to keep out of each other’s space. Then they found legal ways to get around laws preventing such a thing.

Obviously no one is going to go in an build infrastructure when they aren’t sure they can “steal” away customers, but the lack of trying shows they are in collusion. Collusion is an agreement to limit competition. If Verizon went after AT&T they both could drive each other out of business

This isn’t the legal definition of it. It’s like did you ever notice a corner with four gas stations on the corner. They are generally all within a few cents of each other. Why? Do they collude? No, that wouldn’t be allowed to price fix. But it only takes a few months of a “price war” to find the lowest acceptable price for all four. After which an “uneasy” peace is reached and the four stations find a low point. They didn’t set out to do this, it wasn’t done on purpose, but it was done none-the-less

Verizon and AT&T are cherry picking. This is not unique to cable it’s found in a lot of things. This is why there are few supermarkets and hospitals in rural areas or slum areas of major cities.

Yes, they have franchise agreements, but both AT&T and Verizon don’t do anything to prevent them. It’s interesting that Verizon will compete in areas where it thinks it can and will “Wiggle” around them if profit is to be had.

Again, this isn’t BAD from Verizon’s point of view. As you said, they are out to make money. But any limit on competition is bad from the consumer’s point of view. But that’s a great debate

12

Sometimes a lack of service may be waiting on installation of back-end equipment or proper jurisdiction paperwork, etc.

For example, we saw them wire our complex with Fiber at least a year before they said we could get fios. It just sat there for a long time.

13

This my guess. Creating a service like this isn’t like selling rutabagas at the supermarket. There has to be a new pipe for all that bandwidth laid into place first.

I hope it comes to my area soon. Goddamn Comcast’s 250GB limit is actually too little for my needs. I realize I’m the exception, but I watch Netflix streaming every night, often HD, I download big torrents, I’m trying to upload my music to Google Music. I checked my usage meter and before the 1st week of June is over I’ve used half my monthly bandwidth. Fuck.

14

When FiOS was offered in my neighborhood, Verizon sent people out door to door about a month before it went live to ask us to sign up. We have the cable/internet/phone bundle.

We like it, we haven’t had any horrible customer service issues. We got a bad box and we did the self-diagnostics and then called a technician. They sent out a new box pretty quickly.

I do wish we were able to buy a HD cable box instead of paying $10/month to rent them, but I did get them to take one of them off my bill last time I called.

15

Really? That’s disappointing. For my sake, I hope you’re wrong and they’re just horrible incompetent. I’ve tried to look over the fences to see if my neighbors have it, but most of them either have a covered canopy in their backyard or something else is blocking them so I cannot be sure either way

Anyway, here are the pictures of the box from both sides. That’s the fiber optics cables right?

16

Whoa. That looks like the beginning of an infestation of SCP-229. :slight_smile:

17

I’ve been meaning to ask, what’s the deal with that SCP website? Is it some kind of meta-website? A parody?

18

So does anyone recognize a fiber optics box in those pictures?

19

Sometimes a ‘not available’ answer appears ridiculous when it is in fact correct. As mentioend before sometimes the whole infrastructure isn’t in place.

My town has several neighborhoods with underground wiring where they haven’t pulled the fiber yet. Or, they’ve pulled it on one side of the street but not the other. You can have a situation where one house has it and an abutter doesn’t.

I live in one such neighborhood and the neighbor across the street got FIOS a little while before I did; they had to have someone come up and digup the street and run an underground conduit to my side of the street from his.

20

IN our location, I had checked for availability of FIOS, no dice. We had a outside wiring issue and a technician came out to repair it.
We spoke fora while and I asked if he knew when they might upgrade our area, as my daughter has FIOS at her house, a mere two miles away.
He told me that they needed to upgrade the central office, but the borough that it was in was holding them up on permits, trying to get something from Verizon.
So, in some cases, it comes down to corrupt officials screwing over a sizable part of a county, just to get kickbacks.